by Sam Renner
She picks up her datapad and scrolls away from the messaging center. She clicks a browser open and starts looking at the different ships and imagining vacations there. She sees the luxury accommodations. She sees the beds that the people who come to Zulu can only dream about. Those mattresses that are a foot thick and pillows piled high as the sky. All of it covered with blankets that will make you feel like you're being crushed by their weight.
She's looking at pictures of the Barcelona (Because, honestly, that's where she really wants to go. She’s already decided.) when the edges of her tablet screen blink a deep red. It's an alert. A message pops up, covering her view of the long walkways that allow passengers to roam the halls of the Barcelona. The alert is from Rebecca. Grey is needed.
Two more quick bites of salad and a drink of her tea then Gray is up and heading toward the elevator. The long walk down the hall to the control Room seems to last forever.
Grey doesn't like alerts like this. Her heart races. Her mind runs to the very worst things. She opens the doors and Keith is standing over Rebecca shoulder looking at Rebecca's computer screen. Both of them seemed to be puzzling over numbers.
Gray steps up behind both of them and asks "What have we got?"
Rebecca says, “You asked me to notify you if we saw anything strange. We see something strange.”
"It's not that strange," Keith says.
“What is it?” Grey asks.
“It’s a reading…” Rebecca starts.
Keith: “Inside the bounds of normal.”
“Barely.”
Grey: “Enough.”
Rebecca starts again.
“We got a reading that fell outside of the parameters I set. It tripped the alarm, and I called you up here.”
She clicks a few buttons and a dashboard appears on her screen. She points to a chart that's labelled “Water Recycler.”
“Our readouts say the water recycler should be operating right about here, at about 87 to 90 percent efficiency.” Rebecca points to the screen.
“Right now, the readings have us around here, closer to 83 percent.”
Keith leans in for his turn to point at the screen. “But all this green area,” he says, “is what's considered normal.”
“Operationally, yes.” Rebecca says. “But historically, Zulu operates right here.” She points back at the high end of the chart. “In the more than a decade that Zulu's been operational, it's never dropped below 85 percent efficiency.”
She looks at Keith. “Not once.”
She looks to Grey. “Not once, ma'am.”
Grey straightens up and pulls the bottom of her jacket straight.
“I think you both have valid points. The data is interesting, and it's worth noting. But these systems are carefully designed. I am inclined to trust that this is an anomaly for Zulu but not anything to worry about, bigger picture.”
Grey begins to walk to the exit. “Keep an eye on things,” she says. “If something else goes sideways, let me know.”
SEVEN
Lebbe’s mind is running, like it did when he was a cop. He’s on the case again, and it feels great. It feels normal, like he’s finally doing what he’s supposed to have been doing the whole time he’s been on Zulu.
Not that he wishes that things were unsafe. He doesn’t wish that at all. The fact that this place is relatively quiet is a good thing considering the size of the security team. Lebbe knows that. But going to a crime scene, looking for evidence, talking to victims and witnesses, all that is what Lebbe loves. It’s what he’s good at. It’s why he was born.
He didn’t always think that way. Your first couple of cases as a detective go unsolved and it’ll rock your confidence. But being hamstrung by a bad partner makes the job tougher, and Lebbe got two of those back to back when he first made rank. The first was lazy, riding out the years until he made pension. He thought nothing of dragging out a case an extra week or two, or letting it go unsolved, just to keep from having to take on more. His second partner was a nice guy but had no common sense and no instinct. Being a detective for him was like running down a checklist, and when a case took a turn he wasn’t able to turn with it.
Lebbe’s third partner, though. Bill Franks, was the one who taught him how to do this job. Taught him how to ask the right questions. Taught him how to look at a crime scene and pick out the important stuff and ignore the stuff that’s just a distraction. And taught him how to put the questions and the observations together by running scenarios over and over in your mind, like replaying the same scene from a movie time after time after time, only changing a variable here or there, until you hit on the one that makes the most sense. And that’s what he’s been doing since he got a chance to walk through their rogue ship.
He’s waiting on his lunch at the counter at The Quickstop, and he’s rewinding the scene on the ship to just before the pirates boarded. He’s got the crew doing crew things in the hold. There are three of them there, each of them with blasters of some kind on their hips. The ship is rocked. Some of the crew falls. They are stunned for a moment.
Do they fall? Maybe this time they do.
Then they come up firing, painting scorch marks onto the wall with their blasts.
Wait. Rewind.
That’s a ship that’s come into their hold. They aren’t going to miss the ship with their blaster fire. Even the world’s worst marksman could hit the side of a ship from that close.
The crew is there. They are doing crew things. The ship is rocked, suddenly they are breached. They don’t react. They wait. They watch.
Lebbe continues to think, fighting the urge to watch the screens above his head, but it’s hard because he’s stuck. There’s a mass of cooled metal on the floor of their rogue ship that he has to account for.
Think, Jim. What’s going to make a messy mound of metal like that? What? Don’t know, but melting it would do that. Was the heat from the breach so high that it melted some kind of storage bin? Maybe.
In the movie playing in Lebbe’s mind the bin melts. Whoever was on the other ship steps out. That’s when the shooting starts. Blaster fire hits the wall. Scorch marks flare black. Not man marks, though, so it’s a short fight. Then there’s the blood. Lots of it. It’s there on the floor, and over there too. The good guys are getting the worst of it. One of them falls, hit by fire from the bigger blasters in the pirate’s hands. He’s knocked into the wall, an open wound now in his chest. The other member of the crew is still fighting what Lebbe knows will be a losing battle.
One of Quan’s daughters slides Lebbe’s plate in front of him, and he looks up, the movie in his head paused mid fight. Blaster fire hangs in the air, a look of failed determination on the crew member’s face.
He looks to the screen hanging over the counter above him. He doesn’t mean too, but it’s instinct. For the last year and a half this is what he does: he sits at the counter and watches these screens. Three meals a day, every day of the week. So he doesn’t realize what he’s done until he’s done it.
The headlines there are talking about more trouble in Dallas. The screen in his head blinks off. The movie stops. He’s snapped back to his personal reality. He watches the screens long enough that his food goes cool, but he doesn’t care. He has work he should be doing other than worrying about some rogue ship.
None of the footage that’s showing now was loaded onto the servers by Keith. It’s all new, and Lebbe begins to scan the faces on the screens for Sara. He’s looking at eyes, the one thing that wouldn’t have changed since he last saw her.
He mindlessly picks up a French fry and puts it in his mouth. His eyes never leave the screen. He gets halfway through his lunch without ever looking at his plate. The world around him has gone dark. All he sees, his only focus is the screen hanging above him and what’s happening there.
“See someone you know or something?”
It’s Grey. She’s taken a seat at the counter next to Lebbe.
“What?” he asks. “Huh?
No.”
He blinks himself back to reality then turns to her.
“No,” he says again. “Sorry.”
“I’ve been sitting here for a couple of minutes, and you never noticed.”
“Yeah. sorry about that.”
“Unimpressive observational skills.” Grey smiles and plucks a French fry from Lebbe’s plate.
“Those are going to kill you,” she says.
“On the list of things that could kill me, those are pretty far down. And they’re delicious, so I’ll take my chances.”
Lebbe takes a bite of his hamburger then pushes the plate to the back of the counter and turns to Grey. “What’s up?”
“I missed you earlier. You stood me up.”
“Got caught up doing something else and lost track of time.”
“Did you ever go see the ship?”
Lebbe turns his head to the screen and is studying the images there. “I did.”
Grey waits. Lebbe stares at the screens.
“And what do you think?”
Lebbe turns back to her. “I think it all fits the story that our pilot told us. Looks like a breach. Looks like there was a fight …”
“The blood?”
“The scorch marks on the wall from the blaster fire. But, yes, the blood, too.”
“There was just so much of it.”
“Tells me that whoever was with our pilot didn’t survive.”
“That much blood, I can’t imagine they did.”
“I just wish I had proof.” Lebbe takes a long drink and finishes the tea that he was having with his meal.
“Proof?”
“I wish I had a couple of bodies.”
“Why?”
“Bodies corroborate her story.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“I don’t not believe her.”
“You don’t get to equivocate on that point. It’s a you do or you don’t thing.”
“Not in my business.”
“Detective work?”
Lebbe nods. “I had bodies then I’d have proof. Right now all I have is a story that the evidence is telling me. Likely, her crew was killed and the bodies somehow slipped out the wide open hole in the side of the ship. Something bumped them, got them moving and they ping-ponged their way out into space.”
Lebbe flags down Quan’s daughter and lifts his empty glass then continues: “It’s the most logical story, and when you are looking for the truth it’s usually not the crazy story that proves itself out, as much as we may want it to be.”
“But …”
“Yeah, but. But until we can eliminate the fantastic story we can’t eliminate the fantastic story. Make any sense?”
Grey is nodding while Lebbe speaks. “Yeah, it does. So what’s that mean? We don’t really have much more we can do besides talk to the pilot and look at her ship. That’s your crime scene, detective.”
“I still have some questions. Like why was she in a full flight suit? It seems … odd that she was ready for the inside of the ship to lose atmosphere. But I also know that she just may have been more comfortable flying in a suit. Pilots are quirky, creatures of habit and routine. This could have been hers.”
Lebbe takes another swallow of tea and looks up to the screens. The news has moved on from Dallas. It’s talking heads now, discussing issues that are of no consequence to Lebe or Zulu.
“What about Martin?” Grey asks. “McKibbon says he thought something smelled funny.”
Lebbe shrugs. “He has a theory, but he has no proof. Like us. We can make up stories to match the evidence, but unless we somehow get a recording of what happened on that ship then we’ll never know beyond what our pilot tells us.”
Grey drops from her stool. “Have we asked Keith to look into video from the ship?”
Lebbe looks back to the screens. “Not my place to do that.”
“Then I will. Meantime, you mind talking to the pilot again?”
Still staring away: “Will do.”
EIGHT
Grey leaves Lebbe staring at the screens over the counter at The Quickstop.
Something is happening with him. Hes distracted. His mind's not here right now.
She makes a note mentally to ask what's wrong. This isn't the moment to be distracted by nonsense on Earth. She considers, for a moment, asking Keith to allow her to monitor the data coming to his data pad. If she can limit the amount of alerts he gets that distract him, the better off they all will be. Lebbe spending his time watching, even if it's just for a couple moments a day, for people from Earth who'd never come this far out is time he isn't able to watch this station for proper threats.
Lights blink on down the hall as she approaches the medical bay doors. She's going to talk to the pilot and can see the light coming from the room where the woman is being kept. Grey hears the woman quietly singing to herself as she approaches the door.
“Excuse me."
The woman stops singing and looks up to the door.
“Oh, hello.”
“How are you feeling?"
The woman thinks for a moment then says she's fine. “A little sore, but otherwise I'm doing OK.”
“What were you singing?”
“You heard that?” She smiles a shy smile and looks to the ground.
“It was pretty.”
“It's something my mother used to sing to me when I got scared at night while my dad was away. He was a miner. He be gone for months and months at a time, and at some point during one of his trips I'd have a little moment. And mom would come to me and sing. She’d stroke my hair, and I’d let myself get lost in her voice. I don't remember the words as much as I remember the tune. Funny that those things I remember, but I can’t remember what happened just a week ago.”
“My dad was a miner too.”
No, he wasn’t.
“And when he was gone, my mom always made these big meals for us. She’d pick either a theme or a location and the whole thing would be built around it. She’d give me and my sister hints about what the theme was going to be.”
No, she wouldn’t. And you don’t have a sister.
“We’d get so excited with the anticipation of what was to come and getting to guess about the theme that we’d forget we were missing dad. She did it every time he was away, a couple of times a year. I don’t want to say that we looked forward to his trips, but …”
The pilot laughs. Grey fakes one too as she pulls a chair from the wall and sits down. The woman adjusts herself in her bed, pulling the hem of her gown down to cover the tops of her knees.
“Where did you grow up?” Grey asks.
“Earth. Here and there. We moved around a lot. You?”
“I'm a station kid. All of them decommissioned now.”
“Oh, I'm sorry.”
“About which part?” Grey asks through a laugh and shifts her weight in her chair.
“Both, maybe. I can't imagine growing up out here. Not feeling the sun or smelling the grass.”
“Not like you can do those things necessarily on Earth anymore either. But it wasn't that bad.” Grey smiles for effect. She's in the middle of making up a life out of whole cloth. The truth was she did grow up on Earth. A cramped life in a small town, the only child of a dad who made a living selling anything to anyone and a mom who did odd jobs to bring in enough for them to keep their modest roof over their heads and food on the table.
She’d spend her nights outside, looking to catch even the slightest cooling breeze and staring up at the billions of stars and hundreds of stations so many light years away. She’d dream of a life different than the one she was living. One with adventure and responsibility. One that let her play up there.
She continues inventing: “One trip dad left and didn’t come back. We got a letter instead from the mining company. They regretted to inform us of an accident. Mom wasn’t the same after that. Then she got sick a couple of years later. She’d been taking such poor care of herself after dad died, she di
dn’t make it long. That’ll make you grow up fast.”