Voyage

by E M Gale

  ‘Jane’s quite a gossip on the sly.’

  “Are you?” asked Anna in confusion.

  “Well, not ol’ God boy here,” said Sticks, tapping Stonewall on the arm. I nodded. It was true. I’d not heard any gossip about him sleeping with anyone.

  “Really? But how? There are no women in the mercenaries,” said Anna.

  Some of the marines looked at me. A couple glanced at each other.

  “Oh, Clarke,” she said in her disappointed voice. I hated that voice; it reminded me of my mother.

  “Don’t ‘oh, Clarke’ me, lecture them!” I protested, throwing my s  mates to the lion. “I’ve already been lectured so many times, I’m unsaveable, I’m afraid.” She glared at me and Cliff came to my rescue.

  “And it’s not just Clarke, there’s the bridge bunnies, the grease girls and of course Sue and Janine,” he said, naming the catering staff.

  “Bridge bunnies?” Anna parroted.

  “And best of all, there’s shore leave,” said Smith with a smutty grin.

  “You can lecture me, Anna, honey,” said Bron, making eyes at her. “You can do whatever you want with me.”

  “Me too,” said Wright. “You could put on some glasses and pin your hair up all teacher-ish, put me over your knee and slap me on the bottom as I’ve been a very, very naughty boy.” The marines laughed.

  Anna didn’t quite know what to do.

  “Don’t worry about it, Anna,” I said, “they’re only flirting with you. Take it as a compliment.”

  She stared at me wide-eyed.

  Petey came back and gave Anna her drink with a smile, just in case he had a chance. She looked stunned, but accepted it. Then he frowned at Jane, passed her her beer and said: “You’re in my seat, love.”

  “You weren’t using it,” she replied with a shrug.

  “Jane,” said Anna, looking at Petey nervously, “let’s go.”

  Jane sighed, nodded to Anna then smiled at me. “Sure, I wouldn’t want poor Clarke to lose all the attention she’s used to as all her mates sit here lusting over me.”

  I chuckled. “Fat chance, bitch.”

  She scowled at me. Then she looked at the marines. “But you might as well not bother, I have better taste than dirty smugglers,” she added with an arrogant shake of her head.

  “Jane!” hissed Anna. “We’re not supposed to know that!”

  I shook my head at Anna’s attempts at subtlety. Jane shrugged and stood up languidly. One of the marines whistled.

  “You’re not as stunning as you like to think you are,” said Grom.

  “An ugly button-pusher,” said Tim, scowling at her.

  Jane smiled, turned and walked off to a vacant table. Anna turned to us.

  “Uh… sorry about her.”

  “Not a problem, Mistress Grately,” said Bron with a sappy grin.

  As Anna didn’t know what to do, she ran away.

  Petey made a few rude comments about Jane and everyone laughed. Just then Rob entered the bar and, seeing us all laughing, frowned. He walked over.

  “Clarke,” said Rob, with a sidelong glance at the marines. He then decided to ignore them. “Are you OK?”

  I smiled at him. “Yeah, I got my wine, my homies, I’m fine.”

  “Homies?” parroted Petey. “What the hell’s that mean?”

  ‘Oops, more slang.’

  “She speaks like an old movie,” said Cliff.

  “Hey, guys, I was quoting Shakespeare!” I lied.

  “Seriously, Clarke,” continued Rob, talking over the top of the banter. “I heard pirates attacked.” He looked in earnest.

  ‘God, Rob, you’re going to remind everyone.’

  “Yeah… uh, anyway, how have you been?” ‘Drop it, Rob,’ my eyes said. But Rob wasn’t adept at picking up non-verbal signals. Or verbal ones, actually.

  “Clarke! What is the matter with you?” He waved his hands around. “You could have been killed!”

  I rolled my eyes at him.

  ‘Yes, I know that, you bloody idiot.’

  “Rob. Drop it,” I said icily.

  “For goodness’ sake, Clarke, I thought that this would make you see sense! Just what are you doing this for? For whom? What are you trying to prove? Just come and work in engineering like you’re trained for, and stop playing at being a soldier.”

  Grom growled in the back of his throat.

  ‘Yeah, fair point, that’s how I feel.’

  “Rob–” I tried to interrupt, but he was in full flow now.

  “You’re a scientist, Clarke. Why are you lowering yourself to being a mercenary? What possible reason could you have?” He waved his hands and narrowly missed hitting Tim in the head.

  ‘Huh, well… why?’

  ‘Y’know, I don’t have an answer for that.’

  I was silent. I felt the tension in the room rise.

  “Lowering herself?” growled Bron. He was glaring at Rob.

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  Rob just ignored Bron.

  ‘Oh, not a good idea. Don’t ignore an angry seven-foot-tall alien who just happens to be built like a brick shithouse; that’s some general survival advice there.’

  “Rob…”

  ‘Ah, what to say? What would help?’

  I sighed and shook my head. “You’re an idiot. A complete idiot.”

  ‘Well, it is the truth.’

  Rob glowered at me. “For goodness’ sake, Clarke, you’re the one who’s an idiot!”

  Bron shot to his feet, banging his hand on the table and upsetting the drinks again.

  “Don’t you call Kotargralok an idiot!” he yelled at Rob.

  ‘Oh, dear. Way to go there. Now everyone in the room knows my cute nickname. Will they know what it means? Will they look it up? And what does it mean anyway? I’m not good enough yet at Poetic Orcish to understand it.’

  I just stared at Bron. He looked like a Catholic after someone had just insulted the Pope. Rob and Bron eyeballed each other over the table. Rob was very tall, over six foot two, but even he had to look up to Bron, and Rob was as thin and weedy as Bron was muscly and built.

  ‘Oh, dear. Well, Rob, you are brave… but stupid.’

  I did a quick scan of the room.

  ‘Yup, everyone’s watching, but no one seems to be wearing any wondering expressions. They’ve not recognised the nickname. With luck they’ll put it down to a s  nickname.’

  “Thanks, Bron,” I said, waving him to sit back down. He didn’t, but he did lean back and glower menacingly, which was better than swinging a fist at Rob.

  I turned to Rob. He moved his frown from Bron to me.

  “Rob, I don’t know what your problem is, but don’t come over here and insult us. I chose to do this job and I do it. It’s not your place to tell me off about it because, frankly, I don’t care what you think about it. It’s not really any of your business, so you can take your sanctimonious objection and shove it so far up your arse you’ll have to get one of your friends in engineering to use their plasma wrench to get it back out again.”

  One of the marines spluttered a laugh.

  “But…” Rob interrupted.

  “I haven’t finished,” I said coldly. I was doing my best teacher impression and it was working. “You have no right to tell me what I can or can’t do. I know your opinion on the subject and I am tired of having this argument with you. I am categorically not going to come and work in engineering, so you will just have to play with all the pretty machines by yourself. And whilst you are doing that, perhaps you might consider what those damned Kreegle pirates would have done to you if not for the guys you seem so intent on insulting this evening.”

  He looked stunned. I raised my eyebrows at him.

  “Fine!” he said, turning on his heel, then he stalked off out of the bar.

  You’re Quite Poetic, You Know

  I had spent the rest of the evening in the bar drinking, but going far easier on the red wine than I had the last time I had drunk with
the marines. I had already decided I wanted to spend the night with someone warm and willing to partake in… normal sex. After all, life was short. As a vampire I didn’t feel the pressure of passing time any less and, oddly, even knowing I would survive for two hundred years more didn’t help. Anyway, who wanted to be musing about unanswerable questions or switching blood with someone they didn’t like when they could be tussling with an orc?

  Morning rolled round. I left Bron to sleep and headed back to my quarters.

  ‘This is it… I am going to do it. With no musing about questions of probability or causality. I am going to look myself up. Yup.’

  I made myself a cup of orcian coffee.

  ‘I don’t know why Price told me it was lethal, I like this stuff.’

  Maybe I should have mentioned it to Cleckley, but I was comforted by his ‘if you feel fine, you probably are. Even the undead have instincts’ comment.

  I stood by the chest of drawers with the coffee machine on it and booted up the notepad.

  ‘Yes, I will look myself up. I am not going to wuss out. Or think about whether this will change the universe. After all, if I look and I didn’t before then won’t my future self pop out of existence? And if I look, can I change my future? Do I have free will to change it? Or will I be forced to follow my fate no matter what I decide now?’

  ‘I already know I probably go back in time, as there is an older version of me running around. Of course, I don’t know how old she actually is, but leaving that aside for a moment, if I really want to test whether I have free will, I could try to kill myself, since my future self obviously hasn’t done that.’

  ‘Great idea, Clarke.’

  I sighed.

  ‘I wonder how the universe would cope if I did? But then again, fate aside, I’m not going to do that stupid experiment. I suppose I could do something weird like chop a finger off, my future self did have all hers, but again, there is no way I’m doing that.’

  ‘This is why I spent the night with a marine. Sex is way better than these stupid questions. OK, Clarke, stop dicking around and look yourself up.’

  I picked up the computerised notepad. I was about to type my name in when I paused and chickened out again.

  ‘Actually… I’m going to look Rob up first, in the science section. Yeah.’

  ‘Robert Deegen,’ I typed.

  ‘Let’s see. Ooo, he’s published a lot of papers. On plasma physics. Starship engines. Forcefields. Well… that’s cheating, Rob, but hey, why not?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Two Nobel Prizes.’

  I smiled.

  ‘Wow! Well done, Rob! He’ll be ecstatic when I tell him.’

  ‘That is if I can tell him. Did I tell him before? Will he not work if he knows he’s going to get them? What did I do before? Or more accurately what did my future self do?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘This is why I try not to think about this stuff. OK, my future self probably looked. I’m curious, she would have been curious, so anything I do can’t be wrong in regards to my future self. OK.’

  ‘What else can we find out about Rob? Let’s look in the history section.’

  I typed his name in again.

  ‘’The Great Engineer.’ Cool. I bet he came up with that title by himself. Oh, and hey, they made some movies about him. Something about a spaceship in the war.’

  ‘’Missing, presumed dead’.’

  ‘Oh. Well… I guess I knew he would be dead now, but…’

  ‘Rob… Dead… It is a long way off. But still…’

  I shook my head.

  ‘OK, I see why people wouldn’t want to look up their future.’

  I took a sip of the coffee.

  ‘OK, Clarke, don’t be a wimp. Deep breaths. OK, I’m going to look…’

  ‘I’ll start with academic papers.’

  ‘Florentina Clarke,’ I typed.

  ‘OK… I get about two extra papers before I leave academia. Modelling nuclear reactions, blah blah blah. Whatever. OK… history.’

  ‘Florentina Clarke,’ I typed.

  ‘Oh, there aren’t many people with that name.’

  There weren’t many hits either. I read the topmost one.

  ‘Oh, my God, I remember that! Why on Earth is some stupid Student Union Council paper in this? This is me, back when I was an undergraduate and I volunteered to play petty politics over the boat club budget. That was before I decided that was pointless. And I thought I had gotten useful stuff from the library.’

  I shook my head. It was strange to think that something as pointless as that had been preserved for two hundred years.

  ‘OK. Well… Maybe I’m just known as Clarke.’

  ‘Clarke,’ I typed. Three billion hits.

  ‘I got over three billion records on this thing? Wow, it was a good idea to nick a copy of the database then.’

  I paused to think. I wasn’t going to read through that many hits. I could probably manage about ten before I got bored.

  ‘OK, so there are many Clarkes. It’s not an uncommon name.’

  ‘Well, they did know that I was a vampire.’

  ‘vampire Clarke,’ I typed.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell, one billion hits. Honestly! How many people are there with my name?’

  ‘OK… well, what do I know about my past future self? Yes, my future self in the past, what do I know about her?’

  ‘She’s a vampire. She knew the major. She’s famous. People say she likes orcs. She was revealed as a vampire at the start of the Orc-Vampire War. The orcs call her Kotargralok. Yeah. How do you spell that?’

  I took a sip of my coffee and watched the steam rise off of it.

  ‘Clarke vampire orc war,’ I typed.

  ‘Five million hits. Seriously?’

  I sighed into my coffee. This was like PhD research.

  ‘OK, let’s look at the most relevant one.’

  I dropped my coffee onto the table. The cup smashed and hot coffee dripped onto my feet and the floor.

  ‘You have got to be kidding me!’

  I threw my head back and laughed somewhat hysterically at everything.

  ‘’General Clarke’?’

  I shut my eyes, breathed deeply and counted to ten to fight off the rising hysteria. I opened them again.

  ‘Yup. It is still written there on the screen. And there’s even a picture of me, in uniform, at the side.’

  I read the rest. ‘Led the vampires in the first Orc-Vampire War.’

  ‘Oh, right then.’

  ‘And hey, we won. Woo.’

  I shut my eyes and squeezed the bridge of my nose.

  ‘What the hell? I am not a great military leader! I know nothing about tactics or strategy! All I can do is swing a sword a bit. You can’t win a war with that.’

  ‘I won a war?’

  ‘Hold on.’

  ‘I waged a war? What?’

  ‘OK… more reading…’

  ‘Orc spaceships appeared around Earth.’

  ‘Now why did they do a thing like that? They seem so nice, what would they want to start a war with Earth for?’

  ‘And don’t the orcs like me? Surely, I’m their enemy?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Maybe they respect me ’cos I beat them.’

  ‘Hmm…’

  I resumed reading.

  ‘Oh, orcs are clever.’

  I started chewing on my knuckle as I read the article about the first Orc-Vampire War.

  ‘Oooh, that was a dirty trick.’

  I shook my head. This was surreal.

  ‘I guess this is why I needed to learn orcish. Well. There’s five million more hits. And I haven’t read all of this one yet. Yuk. Do I have to read all this crap to be able to do this stuff in the future–uh, I mean the past–or can I just wing it?’

  ‘Well, if my future self really is me, she winged it, definitely. There’s no way I can remember all of this.’

  ‘Maybe… the reason the captain is wor
ried I might mutiny, the reason why the orcs are so polite, the reason why the marines were overawed, is not because I’m a vampire, but because I’m a general. They probably studied that war at the academy or wherever military types get trained in the future.’

  ‘And hey, what about me? When do I get trained? I want my orientation lecture!’

  I sighed and got some towels to clean up the spilt coffee.

  ‘OK. Well. I don’t think I really want to know any more. I don’t think I can take it.’

  ‘So… I’m currently impersonating the person who commanded the vampires and won the first Orc-Vampire War. I wonder who won the second war. Ah… I can’t read any more.’

  ‘At least I don’t die, but Rob… lost in space.’

  I finished tidying up the coffee spill.

  ‘Nothing I can do about that now. I’ve got a while until I start work. I should try memorising the ugrub verb structure.’

  I sighed and looked at my chair and table where I would sit and work on orcish.

  ‘Sod it. I’m going to go and swing a sword round for a bit instead.’

  * * *

  Work was bizarrely not that odd. Even though everyone in the room, myself now included, was now aware I was the vampires’ general. I didn’t know how a general would act, so I just acted normally. And as I was ‘that Clarke’ I guessed that was how ‘that Clarke’ would act.

  After work I found myself in Cleckley’s office. I had considered misting in and rematerialising in front of him but in the end I decided to just knock: it was simpler.

  “Clarke,” he said by way of a greeting.

  I grinned. “And how is my favourite would-be Nobel Prize winner today?”

  He looked amused at that.

  “Come in. Is there anything wrong with you?”

  “No, I just wanted a chat and I figured you wouldn’t mind.” I sat down.

  He raised his eyebrows at that. “And you figured I’d have nothing to do,” he said archly.

  I shrugged. “Surely it’s a good thing if the ship’s doctor has nothing to do? I mean, it’s not as if Elliottson’s arm needs constant care.” Elliottson was one of the marines who had been injured in the pirate attack.

  Cleckley leaned back in his creaky chair. “So what do you want to chat about?”