“Not just looking for illegal pornography, are you?” said Wong. “Find anything good, do share.”
The quartermaster ignored them both, and stared at his cards. “Call,” he said. He tossed in his chits.
My turn, and my hand was terrible. “But I don’t understand why anyone would go to all the trouble to fake an entire civilization like that,” I said. “It seems like a strange thing to do just to study us.”
“It would keep us sane, and in control by external forces. Powerful enough computers and AI machines could realistically mimic a colony; why not many colonies? Why not worlds? We are creatures in a bubble, always observed. We are a zoo of humanity, nothing more.”
“Play your hand, and don’t goad him on,” said the quartermaster. “Are you here to play poker or go to his stupid meeting group.”
I folded.
“It doesn’t really matter does it,” said Jensen. She was not next. Tech Corporal Umbago, Q’s head of the pipe and water maintenance, was next, and he called his hand. He looked around the little table, adding nothing to the philosophical debate.
Jensen continued. “We are here whether we believe it is futile or not.”
“I never said it was futile,” said Obasanjo. “We are sworn to fight the enemy. When I can find the edges of their reality constructed for us, then I can begin to plan our attack. Mankind was never meant to be enslaved.”
“You sound mighty foolish to me,” said the quartermaster.
We only had the one deck of cards. It was heavily abused. Looking at the back of the ragged cards, we could easily see that Obasanjo had the jack of diamonds. It was possible that he had the strongest hand. It was also possible he was holding it so that we could see it as a bluff. When his turn came around again, he bid higher.
“Another thing,” said Obasanjo. “The planet below us is a world of scarcity. We should never colonize such a place on purpose. We never would have if it hadn’t been for the last battle of the war. Think about that awhile. The very last ship, on the farthest corner of the galaxy. We remember a great sacrifice and victory here in schoolbooks from before we were made. Our repairs have wiped away the evidence of war. The planet below us is eternally impoverished of water. Even when all the current planned ice comets are brought in, we will still be only at 36.8 percent water on the surface. No large colony will ever be supported there without more. It is ideal for the limitations of a species proven to be poor managers of resources. The scarcity teaches us better than oceans in their abundance. Wait, whose turn is it?”
“Are you quite finished?” said the quartermaster.
“So,” said Wong. “I met this fellow the last time I was on the surface. He said he had a dildo so far up his ass that he had lost it up there, and it completely plugged his butt. He can’t poo. When the dildo was discovered, they made him an abbot in the monastery immediately.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” said Jensen.
“He’s full of shit,” said Obasanjo. “I’ve heard that one before, told better. It isn’t any funnier this time, Wong.”
He was smiling. “I think I won,” he said. He placed his cards out. He had three queens. “Anybody got me beat?”
“I do,” said Jensen. She had four of a kind, straight six.
“I bet you didn’t think I was paying attention,” said Obasanjo, who also had four of a kind, all jacks.
The quartermaster and tech corporal surrendered to curses and weak hands.
Gambling is not sinful, but it can lead to sin. Greed came over me when I watched Obasanjo pulling in all his chits. I had no extra share in anything at all.
“How about you, Q? What do you think is real?”
“I have spent the last seventeen years keeping this hunk of junk sealed and ventilating properly, with air and water flowing in their proper pipes. In the next life, I will be judged a saint for dealing with your ridiculous notions without slapping any of you.”
Wong tapped the table. “Pardon us,” he said, gesturing at Jensen. “Private hand, if you don’t mind. Grudge match among friends.”
Q snorted. “I’m leaving, then. Do whatever you want. We’re going to hold a prayer meeting on Sunday in the cafeteria, and you should all attend. Every last one of you.” He stepped up and walked toward the door, visibly disgusted with us.
“Thank you, Q,” said Wong, eternally smiling.
The tech corporal, uncomfortable, stood up also. He slowly followed his commanding officer out the door, without a word.
“Anyone else?” said Wong, looking at Obasanjo and me.
“Deal,” said Obasanjo. “I will be taking it all from you in the next hand, Lieutenant Wong. You know that, right?”
Jensen and Wong, then, played their cards, bidding up in hold ’em poker, each hand probably terrible. It took quite a while to get the amount high enough, and then Wong nodded. “Fold,” she said.
Wong collected his chits. “Thank you,” he said.
I watched Obasanjo. He was accepting of it, as if keeping a record of it in his own mind. “Ensign, would you like to sit in on one of our meetings? You should come if only to see what you are missing. There’s very little to do, out here. Philosophy can pass the time faster than prayer and work.”
“I don’t know what I want,” I said. “Should we go, Captain? Should we be seeing this?”
“It doesn’t matter. Relax and play, if you like. Go if you prefer. Wong is in charge of criminal investigations into his own alleged corruption. The admiral doesn’t care. I can tell you’re flustered. Your cheeks are rosy, Ensign. It’s adorable.”
After two more hands, I could not bear to stay. The turmoil inside of me was too great. I had been witness to a crime, and other officers had witnessed it, or chosen not to witness it. I had made a recording on the hull, and I didn’t tell anyone, and it would be investigated by HR in the Milky Way, and word would return to the admiral and come back to me.
Wong had been a bright, cheery, physical man, leading calisthenics exercises and security training. He was always positive, always upbeat. Obasanjo, until then, had been a brooding, subordinate presence. He was lost in conspiracy theories, and obviously did not like Wong. Yet, Captin Oyede Obsanajo chose to stay and witness.
I did not join his philosophy group for quite some time, and did not find it satisfying.
Obasanjo’s investigations were interesting enough for discussion, but the very nature of deep space was distortion. Perspective mattered. Assuming givens as a starting point mattered in Euclidian geometries. I gazed off into the black void, during my day-to-day duties, mapping the unknown where probes revealed it, and trying to identify tiny hidden objects in space, mapping their movements. I wanted to prepare for the patrol voyages. I wanted to seek out the enemy hidden in the dark night of the sky while slicing across the black veil in an elegant warship at near lightspeed. I had no desire to discuss the confusions of space with a bunch of enlisted and Obasanjo. I apologized to him, and declined to attend. He offered to meet for dinner, then, alone. I declined that, as well.
The admiral had a staff meeting, all officers on deck, every two weeks. He was often surly. He glared at us with remarkable redness in his eyes. “Seeing as I am the only completely certified pilot on deck, I shall be flying the patrol, myself. Sergeant Hobarth will be my second, and he will choose the gunnery crew from among the junior ranks. In my absence, Q is the highest ranking. Obasanjo, you have too much to do to bother with staffing concerns and trivialities.”
“Like I don’t,” said Q.
“You outrank him, anyway,” said Lieutenant Nguyen, disgusted. “Can we skip the theatrics, Admiral? I have to debug a sewage line terminal today. My boys will be getting very dirty checking wires.”
“Can I go along with you, Admiral?” I said.
“No, Ensign. We can’t have both AstroNav-trained pilots on the same voyage.”
“He should fly it to preserve you in command,” said Wong. “After all, an ensign is more expendable, sir.�
�
The admiral stopped, horrified that Wong had spoken up against him. He turned and glared at Wong. “You don’t question my commands, Lieutenant.” Then, he leaned over and snarled at me. “Ensign. New meat. Let me be plain. Your scores will never be good enough to fly my warship. Do you understand? When I am not the admiral, you can take it up with the next one. For now, the warship patrols are mine. You will always be lacking in some qualification that I require.”
“Go easy on him. He’s green as a frog,” said Q. “Anyone else object to the admiral flying patrol?”
“I do,” said Obasanjo. “I always do. The admiral has no business doing anything that dangerous. It is against protocol for a reason.”
“Protocol that important to you, is it?” said the admiral.
“Some of the protocols are stupid. Some of them aren’t.”
The network security engineer, Lieutenant Nguyen, whom I rarely saw outside of staff meetings, shook his head and tsked. He was one of those computer engineers who saw uniforms as a suggestion. His shirt was always untucked, and his curled, black hair and beard were bushy and wild. “Let the admiral do what he wants. He is going to do it anyway, and we are better off without him. Sorry, sir, but we are. You just slow us down. I have a stack of reports waiting for approval.”
“Your reports are terrible. Is everyone against me? Wong, even you are against me? I can’t believe I’d ever see the day you spoke against me.”
“I am sure we can find a solution where everyone wins, sir. There’s also Sergeant Anderson’s supply runs. The boy needs to fly a little. That’s all I’m saying, sir. We can’t let him get rusty if the war comes.”
“Lieutenant Wong, you are correct. Ensign, you will alternate Anderson. If he gets his wife pregnant and she opts for early out, I will be blaming you.”
“I understand completely, sir,” said Wong.
“That is going to piss off Sergeant Anderson something fierce,” said Q. “You won’t be helping the ensign make any friends with the enlisted.”
“Ensign. Do you want to fly?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Then it is settled. Anderson needs to spend some time in gravity anyway, or else he’ll end up on early medical release. He’s losing bone density, and everyone knows it. Hell, just look at him. I’ve been avoiding sending him to medical to keep the lines running. HR might just opt him out without any consideration for the mission.”
Later on, I learned what Q did to make peace. Alternating voyages would mean one of us always flies to the gas giants, then the other usually flies to the monastery. I was going to be the miner, and he was going to be spending time on the colony. Wong alluded to being able to reverse the timing for the right price, in a private message, but I decided against it. The Planet Citadel could wait. I was going to fly, and that was going to have to be enough.
The quartermaster was not helpful, and I had to lean on Corporal Adebayo Anderson to ensure adequate preparations were made. The lumbering supply ship was en route back to us from the planet. Obasanjo’s negotiations had him and his second grounded, waiting for a full tank of supplies—especially fresh amaranth grain—before flying home. I got a message from him.
New Guy,
I heard I’m going to be sharing my flight duties with you.
With all due respect, Ensign, don’t do anything stupid with my ship. When I am sitting around doing nothing, you had better be quickstepping your way back. Aren’t you supposed to be flying patrols and playing space warrior or something and leave the lowly resupply to the warrant officers?
With all due respect, sir, I object to this bullshit.
Master Sergeant Jon Anderson Warrant Officer Citadel Station Pilot 2nd Class
I did not respond. Instead, I watched the quartermaster prepping the warship for a deep patrol, envious of deep space flight at near lightspeeds, expanding the signal pathways and early warning systems. He would be delivering free-floating spyware systems out into the gap, where whatever forces and gravities were present would pull and expand the network of listening stations organically. I was supposed to at least help place the devices where the network would be most likely to expand, but he was not interested in my input. I had been studying these empty zones, attempting to make sense of the unseen forces swirling there, where distant gravitational pulls slowly work upon the open artifacts floating, and investigating whatever tiny particles and quantum errata that have been cast away from other galaxies into the black abyss. These occasionally included larger objects, which I tried to identify regarding our unseen enemy, out beyond the black. At night, or what we called a night after our shifts and porridge suppers, I prepared for my own tedious supply run to the cloud of gases at the edge of the atmospheres of the two gas giants, in this system, and looked with sinful envy upon the satellites and probes being constructed for deployment along the patrol route.
This is my meditation upon sinful thoughts: They are a distraction that oftentimes lead to nothing, but it only takes one terrible mistake of distraction to lead to disastrous consequences, and such sinful distractions pull us all away from our true purpose. My preparations for the vessel were not adequate. My mind was consumed with dreams of deep space instead of the mission that I had.
When Sergeant Jon Anderson returned, the drones and enlisted men cleared out the tanks and quarantined everything against contamination. Then, the cleaners swept through. Afterward, as pilot, it was my job to go behind them with the maintenance crew and run the diagnostics on the vessel. I was ultimately responsible. My signature and stamp were on every clearance document. The quartermaster did not even look up from his monitor when I was done checking the vessel. It went straight through to the admiral, and into the official records.
When we flew, I was responsible.
* * *
Confessor, forgive me.
I am not ready to discuss my disastrous voyage to the cloud and back.
I stall. I have little else to do in this prison cell but write my confession. If I stare at a blank page, I will feel the weight of what I am not writing. I must write something. Let me discuss the measure of a day. I believe it helps to explain the numbing effect on the mind that is widely reported among longtime service members upon a station like this one, and perhaps contributes to so many sins. It is little different from a monastery, as there is no spontaneous amorous congress of whatever sort among the uniformed staff without written consent, all prearranged—often matrimonial and contractual in nature.
There is a weekly card game, a prayer group led by Q, and a philosophy club led by Obasanjo, a volleyball team led for enlisted PT under Corporal “Red” Watkins, and for entertainment, we have religious media approved through the monastery only. What little pleasure we derive is circumscribed by the colonial laws that dictate official censors at the monastery.
As officers, we are supposed to be upholders of stricter moral weight as the arbiters of life and death aboard the station. As such, our days are as strict as a monk’s. The lights and alarms go at five o’clock. By five-fifteen, we are expected to report for calisthenics in the main gymnasium facility. This is, of course, just the cafeteria with all the tables and chairs put away.
Captain Wong, then, will lead a hand-to-hand combat class. We are expected to be sweating and grunting for at least thirty minutes in an imitation of close combat. I have often wondered at the amount of preparation for combat, when the reality of space warfare against our unknown enemy was such that no hand-to-hand was ever likely. No boarding had ever been recorded, and the enemy ships, upon defeat, self-disintegrated into mysterious parts with no clear entity inside of them worthy of a punch. We don’t even know what they look like, separated from their warships. Sifting through the ruins was beyond what even seasoned scientists could distinguish into meaningful parts. The objects discovered in the wreckage, and the other carbonaceous materials, were so distinctly alien, they were often just named by shape and color, and sorted as such. Last I heard, the general accepted t
heory was that our enemy was some sort of gaseous entity, in a high pressure environment completely unlike our own, that dissipated upon exposure to zero gravity conditions. What use to sidekick an enemy such as this? Where would we kick? What would we be kicking?
Ultimately, this training session ended with us pairing off against each other practicing different techniques with varying levels of pain and bruising. I did derive great pleasure in squaring off against Sergeant Anderson, and flipping him over my shoulder. He had spent too much time in lower gravity, spinning a treadmill bike for his calisthenics and taking bone supplements. He was a big man, with thick red hair, and the sort of jowly, dogged gestures that were awkward in close combat. Compared to his wife, the man was shockingly soft.
I confess the sin of pleasure in his defeat. He lumbered toward me with an open palm, and then attempted to swipe underneath with his other hand. I blocked the lower hand while grabbing the upper one and twisting his wrist around. I ducked underneath his huge frame, jamming my hip into his leg and unstanding him. I felt a genuine pleasure besting him, locking his arm until he gave in. Wong looked on and cheered me my early and quick victory. I smiled and did not let go. I looked around and Sergeant Anderson’s beautiful wife looked at me and I realized that I was holding on too long. She looked at me, and I felt that I had been gloating over another man’s humiliation, and even if I disliked him, he was loved by someone. I let go, ashamed.
Sergeant Anderson rubbed his arm. “Jesus, kid. What do they feed you at the academy these days?”
“Sorry. Let me help you up.”
He smacked my hand away. “I’ll be ready for you for when you get back.”
After calisthenics, the enlisted showered in gender-separated facilities, where the handful of women would finish early and the men would struggle to finish in time. Two exhausted men ran the entire kitchen, both enlisted. They put the chairs and tables out for morning breakfast, and heated up premade nutritional gruel. Officers went back to our quarters where we had some privacy for at least thirty minutes, which was generally spent clearing paperwork. Before breakfast, the admiral often said a few words to the men, grandstanding mostly, and it was all relatively harmless. The most memorable prebreakfast rally was when he said, “Today is the twenty-first day of April, and that means you are all going to do a great job, because every twenty-first of April, your metrics show amazing outcomes. This is the most productive day of the year, so get your meal down your gullet and get to work, boys and girls!” The room cheered, confused and forcing enthusiasm, if only to open up the cafeteria line as soon as possible.
The Fortress at the End of Time Page 6