I surrendered to my newly found isolation, wondering when I would be assumed to be a low risk of suicide enough to merit so much as a genuine, friendly hello. The warrant officer, Sergeant Jon Anderson, rated for space to surface flight, noncombat, inner-Oort, was in and out all year to the gas giants and their moons for water and carbon and other minerals and gases. When supplies were needed, he had to run to the surface to trade raw material with the monastery for fresh food and vitamins. He’d spend less than two weeks on the ground, before taking off again, to drop off and go back to the gas giants.
Sergeant Anderson’s flight schedule was so tight, it was barely felt. A man came to shake my hand and check my progress. He was little more than a supply jockey, and he had no training on anything more complex than a remote control gas diver, but he towered over me, with burnt orange hair and a proud look like I was a raw recruit to his lofty experience. He left as soon as he arrived, time and again.
I accessed his ratings after he left for one of his supply runs, and I was shocked at how low he had scored. I had beaten him, even early on in my flight career. I was more than his match in a cockpit with all those complex variables, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at his posture and attitude. Naturally, I immediately disliked him. Corporal Adebayo Anderson, Jon’s beautiful, strong wife, was devoted to him. She held his hand while she sat with him in the cafeteria. There were four women on the Citadel Station, and the strongest and most beautiful was married to a man I found distasteful. Sergeant Jon Anderson’s booming laugh echoed into the hall. I imagined, spitefully, that he was sent often on supply runs to preserve the peaceful engine hum on board. I was envious. I admit that it colored my impression of the man. Many of my juvenile fantasies revolved around his wife, at the time.
As the youngest officer, I stood at the end of the line, looking out upon the assembled enlisted. We stood at attention at morning mess, called out roll, read by the admiral, and listened to Obasanjo read out the daily reports in his thin baritone, barely audible even to me at the front of the room. Procedure mattered. Appearances mattered. Maintaining order among the fifty-nine enlisted, here, meant a clean, crisp facade of order, even as the station groaned around us in the stellar winds. Listen to the wind howling outside your monastery walls, do you hear it? We have wind on the station, too.
That mighty Citadel stellar wind blew upon our orbit from the powerful golden star of this system. It pushed against old solar plating and caused parts to slowly wear and strip and groan against their safety locks. Techs rated for Exterior Station Repair suited up before breakfast, if it was bad enough, repairing the groaning paneling where automated drones were too slow and repairs required more direct control than their limited AI circuits could muster. The drones were ancient models, refurbished and refurbished until they were simply unreliable. They often required human eyes to check their work.
Oh, that odd wind, it was much stronger than it probably should have been, and I know that it was a subject of scientific inquiry, related to the contents of the inner star itself. As an Astral Navigator, I was more interested in the outcome than the cause. It impacted every voyage calculation’s escape velocities.
At night, I woke up with nightmares to the howls of bending steel, and the knowledge that the station was collapsing around us, ejecting us into the void. In the morning, when nothing of the sort occurred, we gathered for calisthenics, then breakfast in the cafeteria. The walls continued to groan and groan, and the echoing stomps of repair machinery filled the rooms and halls.
Calmly, we stood, and waited for the world to stop groaning long enough to permit the admiral to speak, and he shouted into the storm. Obasanjo finished and gestured to the cook staff that he was done. We formed a line, then, with officers in the back and enlisted in the front. It was important to the admiral to maintain this custom. We formed a line behind the enlisted, Wong cheerfully describing his plans for the next calisthenics session, and Nguyen cheerfully pretending to care. Obasanjo, annoyed, pushed through into the enlisted line, muttering about the stupidity of waiting. As he did so, with a shocking suddenness, the groan and clamor ceased. The enlisted all took a breath as one.
The admiral was uninterested in the sudden absence of the stellar wind and called out Obasanjo for cutting in line with the enlisted, instead of waiting for the officers. “Captain Obasanjo, have you forgotten your rank?”
“Your rule is stupid,” said Obasanjo. “Write me up if you like.”
“I order you to get back in line with the officers, at the end of the mess line,” said the admiral.
“I have no desire to stand around while I’m due for mission-critical ansible transfers, so you can pretend we are a real military operation.”
“Captain Oyede Obasanjo, if I have to come over there and . . . Wong, stop him.”
Wong looked over, his unflappable smile unfazed. He stepped toward Obasanjo. Enlisted backed away. Obasanjo raised one eyebrow. “Wong, don’t be an idiot.”
“I have to obey orders.”
“The rule is stupid and meaningless. Why can’t we just all get in line together? We have no food shortage now, and I’m very busy today.”
“Don’t make this hard, Captain.”
“I control the pipeline, Wong. I do, not the admiral. You want your letters home?”
That paused him. Obasanjo passed into the food line, through the line, and sat down at the officers’ table unhindered. The admiral glared at Wong but said nothing. The enlisted were all staring, all concerned but staying out of these petty squabbles.
We stared at him.
“What?” he said. Huffing at us, he stood up and took his food out into the hall, presumably to his office where he would be hidden for the day, working and working.
The admiral looked around. “Any other officers feel like disobeying the admiral’s standing orders and military protocol?”
I was shocked at the open disobedience. I couldn’t believe Obasanjo, the executive officer and my secondary supervisor, would do such a thing in front of everyone. It was like watching a mutiny!
Obasanjo took all the demerits, and thought nothing of them. He got demerit after demerit every week, had his pay docked, and just waved his hand when asked, like we were wasting his time with nonsense. Obasanjo also knew that the admiral wouldn’t take him away from the ExO desk. The admiral had no desire to take over the ansible negotiation duties, for even the few weeks until an emergency replacement could transfer in. The admiral did as little as possible—as much as he could push off onto Obasanjo, the better. The admiral’s only joy, beyond his secret stash of forbidden alcohol, was flying patrol out into the black depths past the gravity well of the Citadel star.
Obasanjo knew this; I did not. He looked up at the officer muster after breakfast, in the cramped conference room that was once used as a weapons closet before the conversion of warship to station. Obasanjo pretended to be indifferent to the air of dissent hanging around him. He smirked at me. “You can hold your mouth open like that as long as you like, Ensign, but we don’t have any flies to catch here.”
The quartermaster rolled his eyes. “We are completely surrounded by foolish men, admiral.”
Wong chimed in. “You should come and play poker and get out of your room. It’s bad for you to spend so much time alone, Ensign. You’ll end up a philosopher like the captain.” We were waiting for Lieutenant Jim Nguyen, the network security officer. “Do you play poker, Ensign?”
“I have been known to play a little,” I said. It was all video poker, during school, to practice math and odds. The lesson also encouraged students to believe that when gambling, the odds always won, never the gambler.
“Leave the new kid alone,” said the admiral. “I don’t want any of you influencing him while he’s too green to know any better. That goes double for you, Oyede. I can shut down your little philosophy club if I want to. That is something I can control. Your enlisted friends won’t cross me if I tell them not to go.”
�
�You’re welcome to join us for discussion, Admiral,” said Obasanjo. “You too, Ensign. Poker’s fun, if you prefer that.”
“I never gamble,” said the admiral. “Remember that, Oyede. Ensign, if you want to make anything of yourself, don’t trust the snakes. They’ll ruin you.”
“Even Q plays poker, and he’s a dedicated monastic!” said Obasanjo. “Wong, too. You love your little pet positive attitude!”
“Snakes, all of you,” the admiral grunted. “I’ve got better things to do, but Ensign Aldo is welcome to join you if he wants to throw his money away.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said. I couldn’t gamble until I got paid. It would be a while until I existed in the financial networks, and I had nothing to gamble with.
Jim Nguyen arrived late, as if nothing had happened in the room. He pushed his way past Wong, indifferent to the tension, and sat down. He pulled out his tablet, and put a cup of tea down beside it on the table, finally looking up. He looked around, then got uncomfortable. “Uh . . . I miss something, gentlemen? Sirs?”
“Just Oyede pissing me off again. Let’s get this meeting over with. Captain Obasanjo can run it for the next few weeks. I’m going to be indisposed with other duties.”
Obasanjo laughed. “Yes, sir!” he said. “Of course, sir!”
“Insubordinate ass,” said the admiral. He stood up. “Why don’t you just try running this damn station without me, you cocky bastard.” He threw his tablet at Obasanjo, who barely caught it. The admiral left, and I didn’t see him again for three days. When I did see him, at another bitter breakfast, he looked hungover.
Q was the one who clued me in to the special relationship between Obasanjo and the admiral. The admiral went through the motions, if he was sober. Obasanjo did everything, bemused at his own authority, which he viewed as some sort of alien punishment to endure. Wong suggested avoiding Obasanjo’s philosophy club. They believed that we probably lost the war, if it was even real.
Lieutenant Wong was my favorite, at first. He was station security ops, and handled physical training as well as what amounted to a police force with the fifty-five to sixty-three station personnel. He had two corporals in his direct command. He was a tall, vigorous Chinese man, from Hong Kong, with an easy, constant smile. It was the kind of smile that couldn’t be removed even if the admiral himself was scraping at it with a razor blade. Wong, no matter what, remained upbeat and dedicated to the mission. For a young officer, he was the sort of role model we had been told to seek out in our postings.
He invited me to join the poker games.
“I don’t really know how to play poker,” I said. “I’ve done video poker only.”
“You’ll learn quickly when you start running out of money,” said Wong. “It is an easy game to learn, but hard to master.” He had an inscrutable expression that I could only interpret to mean that he was an excellent gambler. We were in the garage, after the meeting, where I was recertifying with the emergency welding lens.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “I will need to focus on all my recertifications, first. I’m still not legal for Officer on Deck.”
Wong pressed his hand on my shoulder in encouragement. It occurred to me that this was the first warm gesture I had received on board. This simple moment where Wong touched my shoulder and squeezed with a smile on his face made me well up with an emotion I could not explain. When I returned to my welding, there was a sudden lump in my throat, and I pretended to be checking the safety equipment while I pushed it down in the bustling garage.
Captain Obasanjo was the executive officer, the admiral’s right hand. He was in charge of most station business, scheduling, contracts, and resource planning with projection models. He was also constantly negotiating with the monastery and the ansibles across the two galaxies for more food and supply. Interstellar negotiation and report was supposed to be the admiral’s job, but Obasanjo did it all, and filed every report for Admiral Diego’s official stamp. I believe Obasanjo was nominally my direct supervisor, but I flew no war missions and did most of my work under Q, where I was technically in charge of the flight crew that was too busy working with Q to do anything with me. Our colony, as old as it was, was still not self-sustaining. We did not have the water supply, the hydroponics, or the economy on the ground. The ansible was a lifeline, but we could not afford time on the ansible to get everything from there. We also had to trade with the colony for her limited supplies, and the colony could not survive without our supplementation for their seed stock and their capital equipment. It was an impossible scenario.
Captain Obasanjo was cynical about our colony, and about everything.
The earliest memory I had of him expressing kindness was in the cafeteria soon after my arrival, but before his open mutiny. Obasanjo was already getting up to get to his terminal before I was done picking at the bland, green and red porridge.
“You get used to it,” he said, apologetically.
The NetSec—network security officer—spoke up with a snort. “Speak for yourself, Oyede.”
Computer security was handled by Lieutenant Jim Nguyen. He, like Q, spent much of his time and energy cobbling together functionality out of the decaying and ancient station materials. He ate far too much, and was obviously out of regulation, but nobody said anything about it. I watched his weight bounce from one extreme to another my entire posting. He did not give off an aura of good health. He sat behind a desk, and occasionally sent his skeleton tech crew spelunking through ancient passageways after ports and connections that were slowly eaten by rust, damp, and various microbiotic and fungal pathogens.
Nguyen pushed his half-eaten food into his throat in one, giant gulp, and choked it down like medicine. Then, he sipped something that pretended to be a cross between a fruit drink and a tea. It was the closest thing we had to coffee. He grunted to himself, and spoke little.
“You’re pretty political, aren’t you, new kid?” said Nguyen.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
“Exactly. See? A very political answer. You’re going to try to be an admiral someday. Don’t dream big. Dream small. Small dreams don’t come true either, but they hurt less.”
I shook my head, confused. I said nothing else, and continued to shovel the red and green gruel around the bowl.
I will say this for the cafeteria food: Gluttony, of all the deadly sins, was no longer part of my spiritual life. Without wine, without rare and precious vegetables and fruits, there was only gruel and vitamins and pushing them around a bowl until they were cool enough to consume.
I remember sweet champagne, and smoky whiskey. I remember the sweet sea smell of grilling fish. My past gluttony haunts me now.
* * *
Where we were, on the edge of the galaxy, there was such a huge gap between stars because we were near the edge of the Sagittarius cluster, where it looked out to the Magellanic Cloud. Astral navigation was quite challenging, actually, with so few reliable demarcations in the celestial sphere. Each pinprick of light was so far away that one could easily miss targets and waypoints, without precise radio signals. The most minute, fractional variations in degrees possible in the long, dark void were just enough to make maneuvers challenging. The planets of the system were so few. The single, yellow Citadel star, so much like our own solar star, had only three planets, two gas giants and our little desert rock. We relied on their placement for nearly every maneuver in and out of the Oort cloud. And the admiral was the one who flew patrol beyond. He was the only one permitted to fly outside the Oort cloud, into the black depths, firing off probes and engaging in advanced maneuvers with the gravity and debris out there in the dark.
I was not permitted this flight. Recertification with perfection was just a ruse to gently slow down and remove such dreams from my head, and I would have to score perfectly just to earn a confession of the truth: I would never fly patrol under this admiral.
Admiral Antonio Diego brooded into his breakfast gruel. He ate slowly, h
unched over, angrily observing his men. Wong took his gaze in stride, always positive, always smiling, in every gesture, a large or small smile that was the mask he wore against the world.
“Wong, don’t you think you should go check the exterior paneling?” said the admiral. “Take your pick of scrubber techs and see what you find on the hull. I want an extensive report.”
“A great idea, sir! We will check on the work of the most recent maintenance crew, and inspect for any new damage the drones are missing.”
“Do you cry yourself to sleep at night, Lieutenant Wong?” said Obasanjo.
I felt alone, torn between obligations, waiting for someone to do something, confused and uncertain about the true path of my devotion. Call it idolatry, but at the time, I favored the admiral, because I saw, in him, my service oath and the path to other colonies.
Wong asked me if I wanted to join him on the hull, and take some air out there.
I agreed with gusto.
“Watch yourself, Ensign,” said the quartermaster. “We don’t need two chirpers kissing up.”
Theories of reality clashed in the air, unknown to me. I saw things as I believed them to be. I believed that I was a clone of a man born on a boat in the Pacific Ocean, on Earth, across the galaxy. I did not believe I was placed in this colony to suffer, but to work hard and transcend. That is the life that was told to me: Work hard and transcend to other colonies.
Wong can explain his reality well enough. Catch him sometime on the town, in his retirement. He married well, and has children coming soon. Theories of reality are ways to negotiate the complex stimuli of misery. Ask him, and he will tell you that healthy bodies, good investments, and many strong children are the best things in life. Ask him about the way he came about his good investments, and he will pretend that he is just very lucky and very persistent.
The Fortress at the End of Time Page 4