by Amy Spahn
“Good work, Lieutenant.”
“You too, Captain.”
Thomas knew he was in for a grilling. He knew his ship would be examined top to bottom and his story checked and rechecked and his crew debriefed until they were exhausted. He knew he was further than ever from winning back Dispatch’s trust.
But for the moment, he didn’t care. He’d gotten them home alive, and that meant he’d done his job.
Maybe this post wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Then a panel on the back wall exploded.
* * *
A Numbers Game
A Short Story
Thomas Withers groaned as he walked into the spacious office. “That was a long press conference. Can we hold the debriefing till morning?”
“No.” Commissioner Wen slammed the door shut behind them. She dropped down into the big leather chair behind her desk and started turning on her computers with more force than was necessary. “If facing the reporters is too tough for you, maybe next time don’t go off and pick a fight with extraterrestrials.” She seemed like she was going to end her criticism there, but then muttered, “You really screwed the department on this one, Captain Withers.”
“What, with the press?” Thomas asked. “The media loved what I said. I made the department look good! Hell, I made all of law enforcement look good.”
“Yes, the press is all over you, but that doesn’t change the fact that the rest of us are playing catch-up and pretending we knew what you were doing from the beginning, before you went off on your little adventure. You can’t just do whatever you want, Withers. We have rules. We have a chain of command. They exist for a reason.”
Thomas watched her for a moment before crossing his arms. He could sense a fight was coming. “I get the feeling I’m in trouble with the department again.”
“Oh?” Wen stopped what she was doing and narrowed her eyes at him. “Why? Just because you let your chief engineer test some new tech and leave the solar system without permission …”
“Technically he’d gotten it approved beforehand.”
“… ran into a bunch of hostile aliens …”
“Technically only one species was hostile. The other one was nice enough.”
“… and started a war with them …”
“Technically they only threatened to start a war; they didn’t actually do it.”
Wen glared at him. “Fine. Technicalities aside, that’s the gist of what happened. And you want to know why you might be in trouble?”
“I did the best I could under the circumstances.”
“I’m sure you did. Unfortunately your best might have long-term consequences that you weren’t expecting. Like, I don’t know, a war with aliens. Or something worse. Use your imagination.” Wen huffed and turned back to her computers.
Thomas felt his muscles tensing. “This isn’t just about the aliens.”
“What else could it be about?”
“Maybe some latent anger about the other time I disobeyed orders and you couldn’t demote me?”
Wen propped her elbows on her desk and rubbed her face with her hands. “Don’t bring that up right now, Withers.”
“This is that same thing all over again, isn’t it? You and the rest of headquarters are upset because once again, the media is on my side, and you can’t punish me for doing what was right.”
The commissioner’s face suddenly darkened with fury and she bolted up from her chair. “Excuse me? Doing what was right? Do I need to remind you that you’re talking about killing a man?”
Thomas met her anger with his own. “A man who had a hostage, yeah.”
“A man we needed alive!” Wen’s voice rose until she was shouting. “A man who was our best possible source of information for what the Uprising criminals are planning to do next! If you had done what you were told, we’d have gotten that information and we’d finally be a step ahead instead of running neck and neck! And then who knows how many of their attacks we’d be stopping?”
It was after hours, so hardly any other officers were around to hear the confrontation, but Thomas wouldn’t have cared if the entire floor was listening. It was time to get this all out in the open. “The department keeps saying more people would have been saved if I’d let Loretta Bailey die,” he countered, waving his hand in the air to punctuate his point, “but that’s all speculation!”
“Word is you’re chatting with Ms. Bailey regularly since you saved her from Callahan. I realize you’re getting personally attached to her, but you have to see this by the numbers, too!”
“Screw the numbers! Those other people were just possibilities, Commissioner. She was a living, breathing person right in front of me. She has a name, a face.”
That sentence seemed to trigger something in the commissioner’s demeanor. Her jaw muscles clenched and her hands tightened into fists. “You want faces, Captain?” she demanded. “Is that what it takes to make the numbers real to you?” She jabbed at the touch screen embedded in her desk and pulled up a file, then rotated the image to face Thomas. Pointing a finger down at it, she spat out, “These people had names and faces, too. All twenty-eight of them.”
The screen showed a series of driver’s license photos, along with the subjects’ names, ages, professions, fingerprints, DNA analyses—all of the information in a typical police report. Darnell Adams, 36, account manager at a bank. His biceps showed that he worked out, and he obviously put a lot of effort into maintaining a polished smile. Miranda St. Clair, 42, stay-at-home mother of four. Big, curly hair and callouses on her fingertips. She probably sewed or played the guitar. Or both.
“They were all on a routine flight last night from Shanghai to L.A. Uprising operatives did an orbital jump and broke in from above. They didn’t care about the people. They just wanted the ship.”
Harry Intarnia, 79, retired/carpenter. A face that had seen a lot in his life. He probably would have fought long and hard against anyone who crossed him.
Kyla Fitzhou, 28, law student. She had green eyes that defied the world to give her a challenge she couldn’t handle.
Thomas glanced up at the commissioner, a frown creasing his face.
Wen was still glaring at him, but delivered the news in a flat tone. “They depressurized the cabin and dropped all of the passengers over the Pacific. None of them survived.”
Thomas felt like he’d just been punched in the stomach and knew instantly that he’d lost this argument. His eyes dropped back down to the list of the dead. “I get the point,” he said quietly. He knew what was coming next. He didn’t need to hear it out loud.
It didn’t stop her from continuing. “We could have stopped them. We could have found out when, where, and how they were attacking. We could have gotten all of that information from Callahan. But you killed him.”
The commissioner paused for a moment, though Thomas could feel her eyes still boring into him. “Those are the lives that we were trying to defend, Captain. The lives that your superior was considering when he ordered you not to shoot. That’s the choice he had to make, and it wasn’t your prerogative to second-guess him. So don’t you dare stand there and act like you’ve got some kind of moral superiority over the rest of us. We all have to make tough choices in this line of work.”
She paused, glanced once more at the list of names and faces—the list of people—and closed the file. “And we all have to live with the consequences.”
Thomas found himself staring at the United Earth Law Enforcement logo on her computer background, unable to look her in the eye. He could argue that they didn’t know for certain that they could have saved those passengers. That they couldn’t be sure they could break Callahan in time to learn what the Uprising was planning. That there were a million other factors to consider. But he felt in his gut that there was some truth to what the commissioner was saying. He’d saved one life, yes, but he’d likely condemned several others in doing so.
Was it worth it?
Having aske
d himself that question a thousand times since the department transferred him to the Endurance, Thomas thought he knew the answer. And he’d thought he was finally at peace with it, but it seemed that moral questions were never so easy to settle. “I still think I did the right thing,” he admitted.
“I know you do.”
“But you don’t agree.”
“No.”
“Are you telling me …” Thomas knew he was pushing his luck, but if the department hadn’t fired him for botching an investigation and provoking a war with aliens, he doubted that antagonizing his superior would be the last straw. He looked up. “… that you could have stood there, where I was, looked Loretta Bailey in the eye, and let Callahan kill her? Not knowing who these other people were yet, just thinking of them as statistics. Could you have made that choice?”
The commissioner went perfectly still, and Thomas watched as she considered the question. Finally she looked straight at him and answered, “Yes.”
That admission had cost her something. Thomas had intended to point out that she didn’t exactly have the moral high ground either, but he could see from her reaction that she already knew that. He dropped his gaze back to the desk and responded simply, “I couldn’t.”
“I know.”
Silence filled the office.
Both of them seemed to have lost the will to argue, so Thomas thought it would be best to leave. Before he did, though, there was something he needed to ask. “Those twenty-eight people … do their families know? That they might have been saved?”
Wen shook her head. “No. They have enough what-ifs going through their minds already.” She paused, then asked, “Are you going to tell Ms. Bailey?”
Thomas thought about his answer before replying. “No. She doesn’t need to carry that.”
The commissioner nodded. “At least we agree on something.”
Thomas turned to go, but Wen’s voice stopped him. “I’m sure you’re going to go over this conversation in your head a million times, trying to decide if you were right or not. I meant it when I said we all have to live with the consequences of our choices.” She paused. “But you don’t have to let them drag you under.”
He looked back at her over his shoulder, surprised by the sudden show of empathy. They stared at each other for a few seconds, and Thomas decided that, much as he didn’t like her or her way of doing things, he at least understood her position. And he got the feeling that she understood his. That was enough to merit some respect. “Thanks,” he said.
She nodded once, then looked back to her work. “See you in the morning for the conference debriefing.”
“Yes ma’am.”
He shut the door quietly as he left the office.
* * *
Book Two
Mightier than the Sword
Suffocation. Viktor’s lungs burned for air, but the toxic atmosphere of the ship gave him no reprieve. He again checked the time and wondered when it would finally be his turn to don an oxygen mask and escape this hell. True, the air tanks would only prolong the crew’s torment, but by breathing in shifts, they might survive long enough to …
“What are you reading?”
Annoyance. Why did people always ask that question at the most dramatic part of a chapter? Viktor Ivanokoff looked up from his computer tablet, ready to chew out whoever had dared disturb him while he was off duty. “I do not do interrupti … oh, hello, Areva.”
Areva Praphasat leaned on his open door hatch, her dark-haired head tilted to the side with her question. “Can I come in?”
“Certainly.”
She stepped through the hatch and entered Viktor’s berth. Like every personal compartment on the UELE Endurance, the room was small, with a lofted bed over a desk and a set of drawers, all constructed of the same grey metal. The walls were a boring shade of off-white, but Viktor had covered them with his mounted gun collection and a set of shelves that held an assortment of hard-copy books. Some texts just read better when he could feel the paper and smell the ink. He also had a cushioned folding chair that he’d “borrowed” from the rec room and placed in the one unoccupied corner to serve as a reading spot. He sat there at the moment. His long legs took up most of the empty floor space.
Areva seated herself on Viktor’s desk chair, which she rolled to one side so that she couldn’t be seen through the open hatch. She looked troubled, and Viktor had one guess about why. “The captain should return soon from his latest meeting with Dispatch,” he said.
She sighed. “Hopefully with good news.”
“I doubt that. They will send us back to Neptune. You will see.”
“But it’s been a whole month, and we’re still all over the news.” Areva leaned forward. “They have to let us do something more useful than traffic duty in the middle of nowhere!”
“Dispatch hates the Endurance, Areva. They will never trust us with anything important.”
“But we were the first ship to discover an alien species. Two alien species.”
“Which made them hate us more. The trip was not exactly planned.”
“You’re such a pessimist, Viktor.” Areva sat back. “You’d think the threat of alien invasion would at least make them want to explore what else is out there.”
“The threat is not real. The tech team said that the Haxozin did not find the location of Earth when they accessed our computer. Aliens will not invade us today. Or any day, so long as they do not know where we are.”
“Still. They should organize more exploration.”
“If they do, they will not send us to do it.”
Areva paused. “Then I guess you’re not planning to meet the captain at the airlock to hear about his meeting?”
“I do not do airlocks.”
“You should probably compromise this one time. If you’re right about Dispatch still not assigning us a new job, the captain’s going to be in a bad mood. It won’t help to make it worse.”
Viktor remembered Captain Withers’s first few days on the ship and felt inclined to agree. Though the ire of a superior officer didn’t bother him personally, it tended to ruin the morale on the ship, and as first officer, he was supposed to avoid causing such problems. Besides, Areva had asked him, and he didn’t like to turn her down. “Very well,” he said. He stood up and placed his computer tablet on his desk.
Areva glanced down at the active title. “Jules Verne?”
“Da. Unfortunate that this meeting is scheduled during one of the only interesting parts of the book.”
“It’ll still be there when you come back.”
Viktor waved a hand. “I have lost my momentum. It will not be the same. I may just start the chapter over again.” He turned toward the hatch just as Matthias Habassa, the Endurance’s chief engineer, capered by. “Lieutenant,” Viktor greeted him.
Matthias stopped and grinned at him. “Hi, Ivanokoff! Are you going to meet the captain at the airlock?”
“Yes.”
“Stellar. We can walk together. Is Areva here, too?”
Viktor glanced over his shoulder and saw that Areva had vanished from the chair. He squinted and looked around his berth more carefully until he noticed a slight movement near his desk. Areva had ducked beneath it. He caught her eye and inclined his head toward the hatch in a silent question. She shook her head, but smiled at him.
Viktor stepped out of his berth and closed the hatch. “No,” he told Matthias, “but I imagine she will meet us there.”
“Okay. I just thought she might be here since you two spend so much time together.” Matthias resumed his route down the corridor, his quick stride almost outpacing Viktor’s longer legs. “Do you think the captain has good news this time?”
“No.”
“I think he does.”
“You said that last time.”
“I know. But I have a feeling. You’ve got to keep a positive mindset, sir.”
They reached the airlock shortly and found Chris Fish, the chief scientist and head of
the scanners team, leaning against the wall.
“Sergeant,” Viktor said.
“Lieutenants.” Chris turned his pointy nose toward the other two officers with accusatory force. “Any idea what this is about?”
“It is probably just another delay in Dispatch re-assigning us,” Viktor said.
“That’s not what I think. Want to know what I think?”
“No,” said Viktor, just as Matthias said, “Yes.”
Chris glanced both directions down the corridor and lowered his voice. “I think the captain’s gone over to them.”
“I see,” said Viktor. He actually had no idea which “theory” the scientist was referring to this time, but he’d learned a long time ago that questions only drew out the conversation, and he did not want to listen to another of Chris’s conspiracies. Not with Jules Verne’s tipped iceberg scene still so dramatically fresh in his mind.
Chris, however, didn’t seem to care about Viktor’s preferences. “The government’s not happy about what we found in the galaxy, not at all.”
“You mean the aliens? The government’s mad about that?” Matthias asked.
Viktor rolled his eyes. “Habassa, stop encouraging him.”
Chris huffed. “I obviously mean the aliens! They threatened to invade Earth! That’s a big deal. And the only reason they did that is because we didn’t surrender to them.” He leaned in closer. “I think Dispatch wants to send us back to them as a peace offering to stop this war from happening. And I think the captain’s working with them to save his own skin.” He nodded again to emphasize his point. “All I’m saying is, if we’re sent out of the solar system again, watch your backs.”
“Aw, come on, Chris,” said Matthias. “You’re still mad because the captain suspended your side research for a week.”
“That’s not what this is about!”
Beep beep! The noise announced that someone had entered their authorization code—incorrectly—on the other side of the airlock.
“I think it is. You need to let that go, buddy. Here, take a deep breath.”