Voyage

by E M Gale

  “Maybe the doc asked her to do something she didn’t want to do in her medical?” suggested Petey, smirking.

  “Huh, yeah, right, like there’s something Clarke wouldn’t do,” commented Connor. Bron, the orc, laughed at that. I rolled my eyes.

  “Honestly, guys,” I commented.

  Rob wasn’t looking too happy at the interruption. He ignored the mercenaries, leaning towards me. “Clarke, I don’t know why you’d want to lower yourself to being a mercenary.”

  ‘Uh-oh.’

  Connor frowned at Rob, but I guessed because Rob was a technician he didn’t feel like attacking Rob about it, and I think he was still smarting over his defeat in the sword-fighting exercise. “Huh, she’s not really much of a mercenary,” Connor said.

  I glared at him.

  ‘OK, I’m not that great at everything, but I kick arse at sword-fighting and every one of them knows it.’

  “Yeah, less a soldier, more in-flight entertainment,” sniggered Petey.

  I scowled.

  ‘That’s it. I’m pissed!’

  I stood up, turned to Rob and Anna and said, “Wait here, guys, and mind my drink. I’ll be back in ten.” I then grabbed Petey and Connor both by the ear. “Come with me,” I said, less pleasantly, and pulled them along after me.

  Connor yelped and they both followed. I glanced back. Anna and Rob looked shocked. The human mercenaries tailed us, hooting derisively. Gromley looked disturbed.

  As we headed down to the practice room we bumped into another s  on their way off shift who, sensing entertainment, followed us.

  I stopped in the middle of the training room which, at that point, was not being used.

  “How dare you,” I said in a low tone of voice to Connor and Petey. I let go of them both in the practice circle used for one-on-one fights. “You think you’re better than me? Prove it. Both of you can take me on, without swords.”

  They looked stunned. The crowd was yelling at them. I thought I even heard a, ‘Hah, show her her place!’

  ‘OK, this is it. I beat these two guys and get the mercs’ respect or I’ll be putting up with this sort of thing forever.’

  Connor and Petey looked at each other, but as the crowd was cheering them on, they couldn’t back down. Connor started by throwing a half-hearted punch at me. I dodged it easily and jabbed him in the ribs. Basically, I was doing sword-fighting moves but using hands instead of a sword.

  Petey wasn’t stupid enough to go for half-hearted attacks. He rushed me. I dodged and threw him over my hip on the way past. He crashed to the floor.

  I waited for them both to get up. I had calmed down a bit by this point.

  They had gotten over the fighting-a-woman thing and changed tactics. They both rushed me at once, Petey aiming a low punch at my gut and Connor aiming a side-swipe at my head. But I could see them coming at me slowly. I dodged to the left and blocked Petey’s punch with my right hand. At the same time, without looking as I knew where he’d be, I aimed my left fist straight upwards into Connor’s jaw. He fell back, his attack missing me. I changed weight and kicked Petey square in the side with my right leg.

  There was a silence in the room other than the sound of the two mercenaries picking themselves up and swearing. I addressed the crowd. “Now, in that fight, who was entertaining who?” Cliff looked impressed, and one of the orcs present chuckled.

  Then Petey, I think, jabbed me in the kidneys. I tipped forwards and his arm was around my torso in a lock, bending my back and pulling me off balance. And Connor, backing up his mate in need, although still holding his jaw, aimed a kick at my stomach. I jerked back out of the way of his foot and ended up half on Petey and completely restrained by him. I struggled, until Conner grabbed my legs. At this point, I gave in and kept still.

  “Fucking arseholes,” I muttered. “Ganging up on me.”

  Petey chuckled. “I’m gonna let go now, you’re not going to be a sore loser, are you?”

  I blew the air out of my mouth. “No.”

  He let go. I got up. The temptation to land a kick on him was strong, but he was not stupid and had moved outside of my range. I glared at Connor, but he was standing silently, still holding his jaw.

  ‘Fuck, well, I guess I didn’t need the respect of my team-mates anyway.’

  I stomped back to the bar.

  With a sigh, I flopped down on my chair and started on my glass of wine. “Sorry ’bout that, guys.” Rob was frowning at me.

  “What were they talking about, Clarke?” Anna asked suspiciously.

  ‘What, the ’in-flight entertainment’ comment? I thought that was obvious. But she’s probably just building up to calling me a cat again. Or maybe a cat in heat would be more accurate.’

  I frowned.

  “Well? Why did you set the doctor’s office on fire?” She’d already loaded up her disapproving tone of voice.

  ‘Ah, that.’

  I shrugged. “I only burnt a bandage and anyway it was an accident.”

  ‘Well, actually it wasn’t, but I wouldn’t have done it if I’d thought it would set off the fire alarms.’

  She looked curious, but changed angle. “And what did you do, yell at them? Will they be up here to continue the argument?”

  I shook my head.

  ‘Yell at them, Anna? Why would that help?’

  “Why don’t you quit that job?” Rob asked in a low tone of voice.

  ‘Ah, here we go.’

  “I can get you a job in engineering.”

  ‘True enough.’

  “I’ve kinda settled in there,” I said, shrugging.

  “Didn’t look like it.”

  ‘Fair point.’

  “That was just banter, they like me.”

  ‘I think.’

  “Huh, they don’t respect your intelligence.”

  ‘I doubt they respect anything about me now.’

  “Ah, drop it, Rob,” I said tiredly, leaning back in the chair and pinching the bridge of my nose. “I don’t fancy another argument with you.” Especially since I couldn’t attempt to solve this one by sparring, which is a pity, because Rob, at least, I was confident I could take in a fight.

  “Clarke, you’re a physicist, not a soldier.”

  ‘Dammit. Fair point.’

  And just like that, what little confidence I still possessed evaporated.

  ‘He’s right, I’m not a fighter. Any one of those mercs was better than me and had any of them landed a proper hit on me they would have broken my jaw or something.’

  I ran my hand along my jaw, thinking about how much that might hurt.

  I looked down at the reflection of the stars behind me on the surface of my wine and shook my head.

  ‘Ah, he’s right. I’ve been overconfident. I was OK in the one-on-one sword-fights, but I still haven’t dealt with a real situation yet. When I do, I will probably go to pieces and get myself killed, or worse, get some of the other mercs killed. Maybe when the time comes I should stand behind the orcs. They probably handle themselves the best. Anyway, they’re the biggest.’

  “You’re right, I guess,” I said very quietly into the mirror of my wine.

  “Clarke…” started Rob.

  I turned away from him to look out at the stars through the viewscreen. Except I focused not on space but my own reflection. I looked young, female, fragile and sad. That was not the face of a mercenary. I turned away from my reflection and lowered my head, scratching at the table top.

  “I’m sorry.” Rob bent his head down to try to catch my eye.

  I raised my head to look at him. “What for? Didn’t you just tell me the truth? Why should you be sorry for that?”

  “Well, if you know it’s the truth are you going to leave then?”

  I looked at him in surprise.

  ‘Obviously I can’t leave the job. If I can’t get good enough to survive by myself, all I can do is practice standing behind the orcs and hoping I don’t cause their deaths.’

  “For goo
dness’ sake, who cares about whichever job Clarke wants to do!” said Anna.

  ‘She doesn’t care that I’m crap at my job?’

  “Aren’t you worried about her?” asked Rob in surprise. Anna shrugged.

  I noticed Mark was coming up the corridor, without Jane. I could smell him before I saw him enter the bar. He waved at us, bought a drink and then came over to join us.

  ‘Good, perhaps now the topic of conversation may be something other than my inadequacies.’

  “Hi, Mark, how’s life?” I asked with a glint in my eye. He didn’t pick up on it.

  ‘Oh, well.’

  “Fine,” he said.

  “You seen Jane about?” asked Anna.

  “No, why? Should I have done?” He grinned like a loon, but Anna didn’t notice.

  ‘So… Anna doesn’t know. But anyway, why is Mark drinking with us when he could be having sex with Jane? And where is she?’

  “Well, how are things going? Do you like engineering then?” I asked Mark. Rob was frowning at me, but kept quiet.

  ‘Maybe he’ll drop that subject of conversation now Mark’s here.’

  “I like engineering just fine.” Mark looked awkward for a moment. I got the feeling there was a ‘but’ coming. “Look, I’ve been talking with Jane…”

  ‘Oh? I wouldn’t call what they’ve been doing conversation. Though it is a type of intercourse. Heh.’ I smirked.

  He looked at me, serious for a moment. “And we think that you’re wrong, Clarke. This isn’t a smuggling ship.”

  I stared back blankly.

  “What do you mean?” asked Anna.

  Mark leaned in and lowered his voice. “We think it’s a pirate ship. Jane says it’s too heavily armed to be smuggling. Aren’t smugglers supposed to travel fast? And why would smugglers need so many mercenaries?”

  ‘That sounds like crap post-coital talk to me.’

  Rob and Anna were looking at each other.

  ‘Great, I have dissension in the ranks here.’

  “Well, Clarke?” asked Mark. “You’re the mercenary, why does this ship need so many?”

  ‘Gargh! Why can’t they just discuss the weather or quantum mechanics or the fact we’re going to make landfall the day after tomorrow, or anything that doesn’t involve bashing me about my job?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Although now that I think about it, the mercenaries were not very… well… mercenary. Hmm, he’s right, there is something odd about this ship.’

  “Maybe the captain’s just paranoid. He seems pretty paranoid to me–”

  ‘Yeah, why all that talk of mutiny?’

  “–but anyway, Cleckley told me they smuggled,” I added.

  Anna nodded at that. Rob looked chilled out: it seemed they all liked Cleckley.

  I continued: “They aren’t pirates. The stuff they’re carrying is on the cheap cigarettes end of smuggling–”

  ‘Maybe, although I’ve never seen what they are actually smuggling.’

  “–rather than the sharp and pointy end of piracy.”

  ‘OK, well they do have lots of sharp pointy swords. Shiny, shiny swords.’

  “Well, that’s OK, then!” said Mark hotly. “And who decided that bending the law was OK?”

  ‘Eh? What is he upset about? Has he forgotten that we were running out of money? Any job’s better than starvation. Now that they’re well-fed they want to start questioning my decision to take this job. If it wasn’t for me, they’d be in a homeless shelter on Ragnarok IV now.’

  I leant back and shook my head.

  “Clarke did, but–” said Anna.

  ‘Fine, have that conversation, but you can go on without me.’

  I let their discussion bounce over my head.

  ‘Mark is right about one thing, there is something fishy here. I would probably have noticed it before if I hadn’t been so concerned about learning how to fight. Of course, I’ve never been on a smuggling ship, but this ship just doesn’t feel… casual enough.’

  ‘And I really ought to see what they are smuggling.’

  ‘Of course I wouldn’t know one form of contraband from another, but I guess I’d better do some research to find out. Maybe Rob’s right. I’ll gather information and then see where that gets me.’

  I drained my wine and stood up.

  ‘Well, no time like the present.’

  “So if you start from utilitarian ethics–” Anna was saying.

  “Where are you going?” asked Rob.

  I smiled sardonically. “I’m going to think more like a physicist and less like a soldier.”

  “What?”

  “Catch you guys later,” I said and walked away slowly, so I could use my sharper senses to hear what they said after I left.

  “Did I upset her?” asked Mark.

  “No,” said Anna, “I think Rob did.”

  “What, me?” Rob said. But by then I was down the corridor and out of earshot.

  * * *

  I headed back to my quarters and shut the door. The room was nice and dark. I slowly reduced the opacity of the screens over the viewscreens.

  I stared at the stars for a minute, then made myself my first cup of orcian coffee. I took a sip. It was strong and not particularly pleasant. I took another sip.

  ‘Yuk.’

  I poured the rest down the drain and sighed.

  ‘Well, I wanted to try it. Now I know it’s awful.’

  Giving up on the coffee, I settled onto the sofa with the notebook. There was a limit to how much I’d been able to fit on the damn thing when I was on Ragnarok IV. Furthermore, the ship didn’t seem to have any sort of equivalent of the internet, a library or anything like that. I’d downloaded all the science I could so I could see how we might get back and as much law as I could, so we could avoid breaking it–or at least know when we were breaking it. I’d also gotten everything I could on the science of vampires, but I’d missed out the myths and rumours.

  ‘Shame really. I’d like to see the next piece of misinformation out there before someone tries to force-feed me garlic. Actually, garlic is something I meant to test earlier along with wood.’

  I fished the bulb out of my pocket and looked at it. I’d stolen it from the kitchens earlier along with a couple of toothpicks that I would now never use anywhere near my teeth. With the smell of the garlic and the pungent coffee my room was really starting to stink. It was worse than the smell of cigarettes.

  I padded over to the sink and peeled a clove. The smell was overpowering. There were bits of garlic under my fingernails and it stung slightly. But I remembered peeling garlic had been an unpleasant experience before I became a vampire. However, I had done it a lot because I loved the smell of the stuff. But it never used to smell quite so strong.

  ‘I really ought to go and ask the doctor to watch me to make sure I don’t do anything odd… like die while I try it.’

  But I figured he wouldn’t let me into his office for a while.

  I touched my tongue to the clove. It didn’t burn or anything.

  ‘Hmm.’

  I chewed thoughtfully on the clove and went back to my research. Now all I could smell was garlic. The smell coming off me was so strong that it made it harder to smell everything else.

  ‘Yuk.’

  I got up to space the rest of the garlic, but then an idea occurred to me. I hid the garlic away–though hiding it didn’t make it smell any less–and went back to the stars and my research on contraband.

  * * *

  Getting My Wings

  A few hours had gone past. I had also almost completely lost my sense of smell, since all I could make out was the various shades of garlic smell steaming off me.

  ‘This is worse than smoking.’

  The smell of cigarettes had seemed to cling around me for hours. It was annoying enough that I’d finally managed to kick the habit, but at least the smell could be showered off. I’d had three showers and I could still smell nothing other than garlic-flav
oured Clarke.

  I had, however, gained a good knowledge of what was banned and why and even a vague idea of what it might look like.

  I yawned; time to give up for the night. I sat and stared at the stars for a bit and tried to enter the connectedness state. I hadn’t felt connected to anything outside myself since that night on Ragnarok IV. I suspected that I would never feel that again. But, staying calm, I felt that I could understand something within myself. I thought about getting stronger; I needed to be stronger. I knew that, for normal humans, it was possible to increase muscle tone by thinking about it; I wondered if it would work for me. I’d been dialling up the weights in the sims rooms for my exercises, trying to get stronger the standard way; my muscles ached at the end of each day.

  The next morning I was up bright and early, after my now-standard four hours’ sleep. It was still part of the graveyard shift. Even though the mercenaries’ rotating shift pattern meant there was cover all twenty-four hours in the day and the bridge and engines were manned all the time, now was the point where most people were asleep. I got dressed quickly and headed out. But today I didn’t hit the sims. Instead I ambled around the ship. I started off in the goods bay, thinking naively that since everyone on the ship knew it was a smuggling ship the contraband goods might be out in plain sight: they weren’t. All the boxes in the goods bay contained exactly what they were labelled as.

  I ambled around looking for unaccounted volume in the ship, but it didn’t really get me anywhere. It was difficult to visualise the size of adjoining rooms to see if there were hidden compartments. What I really needed was a copy of the ship’s blueprints, and where would I get that? I’d have to be careful; a copy of the ship’s blueprints would be the first thing a mutineer would want too. That and access to the weapons locker.

  After work, I went to find Rob just as his shift finished. I liked the engineering quarter of the ship; I liked being around interesting and efficient-looking machinery. The main engineering bay was overlooked by a bank of computers. I walked into that bit and stood with forearms resting on the gilt rail admiring the machines. Rob moved around them. I had no idea what he was doing, but it looked important. After a while he noticed me and waved. I waved back.