I took a deep breath, and then exhaled. “I just wanted to fly. That’s all.”
“You’ve flown. Pilots can build things, and understand how to build things. You have technical training Obasanjo and Wong lack.”
“I’ve never flown the warship. Who will run patrols for the enemy? And what about Wong? What does he do all day?”
Wong laughed. “You think anyone would put me in charge where I’d have more power?” He flexed his muscles. “I volunteer. Quartermastering is mine.”
“No,” said Q.
Obasanjo snorted. “Wong, shut up. You know we don’t trust you with that. You don’t have the certificates in all that mechanical engineering like a pilot does. It has to be Aldo.”
“Let Wong do it,” I said. “He’ll be fine.”
Q placed his hand on the table and tapped to get everyone’s attention. We all looked over at our new acting admiral. “Aldo is the new Q. No one will be flying the warship for a while, and we haven’t seen anything for two hundred years. Survival first, then scouting. You’re the new Q, Lieutenant Aldo,” said the old Q. “Sergeant Adebayo Anderson will keep you moving in the right direction until you find your sea legs. Don’t blow up the damn station.”
For some reason, no one ever stopped calling him Q. No one ever called me Q. I was just the person who came in after him to the job no one wanted. It was long and dull and full of personnel charts and supply charts and by then, we had a master sergeant qualified to fly supply ships when I was off-cycle and needed time in zero-g to get my bones and guts in shape. He would need a pilot, though, to pace him, eventually, and even this wouldn’t be me. A new pilot would come, fresh from the War College, eventually.
And I was going to sit behind a desk and stare at reports all day, and run the calendar, and look for damage in the hull, in the wires, in the whole station, and hear the groaning of the hull, the plumbing sputter and break, the rot of biotics rising up from broken pipes.
I wrote Amanda immediately and told her of my imminent promotion to acting quartermaster. I would not be able to fly down on supply runs. I would not be able to lean in close to her, and smell the sand in her hair. I admit that when I imagined my time in retirement, what I thought about most was Amanda, and the cost in medical materials and procedures to make children with her. I wanted to build a future on the planet, because I felt more and more like I had no future in the service. It was a distraction from the scheme that was building in the dark places of my mind, where I was cataloging different space objects in a mental file for possible use, and trying to figure out the precise procedure that would put all the pieces in place.
As the new quartermaster, I met with the staff of grumpy enlisted that lined up under Sergeant Anderson’s command. She introduced each one to me, from senior staff to junior. I had mostly corporals, with the one sergeant, and four privates. All four of the privates were going to be dead from a group suicide by the time I finished my first month in their command. They were going to be repairing and cleaning out the biota near an empty airlock where the transport ship was going to be flying. All together, they’d climb inside and shut the door and depressurize into open space so suddenly no one even realized it happened until repair drones started screaming outside the hull.
We were all depressed. We walked around from duty to duty in a daze. There was nothing to do but work hard at tasks that repeated weekly, and monthly, and felt as tedious and meaningless as the war effort itself.
Sergeant Anderson and I were alone in my office, discussing the sudden suicide.
“You’d tell me if you were feeling that bad, I hope,” I said.
“I would never, sir.”
I had been compiling all the video records together into the report, and paused at my recommendation for future action.
“What do you think we should do, Sergeant? What’s the answer to the suicides?”
“Hope, Lieutenant. I will be done in four years. I will go to the planet to reunite with my husband. We will have a life there.”
“It’s a long, hard life,” I said. “The colony is still desperately underprovisioned. Terraforming takes decades, centuries. Our grandchildren still will not know what it means to walk barefoot in green grass on a bright, sunny day, or to fish in deep water.”
She said nothing, and crossed her arms. She looked up at the ceiling and spoke. “We have some pleasures, still. There is enough food, medicine, and housing to live well enough. More than enough. There is rock climbing. There is windsurfing. These are worthy distractions. The world will be built. We will build it slowly.”
“I applaud your hope, Sergeant. How is your husband?”
“He has been deputized by the monastery to fly surveying missions in the atmosphere to aid terraforming projections. He says it is quite dull, and the food is just as bad there as here. He says Ospreys are not well suited to the winds.”
“At least he’s flying something,” I said. “Is it wrong that I am jealous of him?” I looked over at the report, with the video showing our drones and crawlers grasping futilely at the frozen corpses of the four privates who had each been here less than seven months. “This is what I am doing today. The inquest is tomorrow. I won’t be flying again for a long time.”
She squinted at me. “You have your own little hope on the planet, as well, I am to believe?”
I blushed. “Hope is such a strong word,” I said. “I have a friend. I hope she will be a good friend.”
“There aren’t enough good friends to go around. We are all so afraid of pregnancy until retirement, when we are afraid to fail at it.”
“The supply line is not robust,” I said. “Two or three broken pieces in the chain, and we could all starve.”
She shrugged. “Or, your team could fail to seal an airlock correctly, or more micro-meteors chip away at us, or our radiation shielding is not working correctly, or we accidentally develop a terrible plague in our little biotic island. Does anyone even smile? Is there a reason to smile? Volleyball is a great distraction. You should come join us. Everyone should. Games and sports can really help us all.”
“Poker night,” I said. “When did you abandon Obasanjo’s philosophy club?”
“It circles around the same conundrums, without release.” She rolled her eyes. “No, there’s no physical release here. There’s just gambling. Action, and competition, are best. Physical release.”
“Philosophical release is far preferred on the station, and poker.”
“And that leads to suicide.”
“Athletes have killed themselves here, Sergeant. My own AstroNav predecessor ran laps on the lower floors until he developed arthritis in a knee.”
“Would you accept a suggestion on the way we run the crew here?”
“Of course, Sergeant. If I had any choice in the matter, I’d have put you in charge of the whole quartermastering operation the moment the admiral died.”
She nodded her gratitude stiffly and politely. “Lieutenant, can we make our work here competitive? Can we reward those who do the best job with something tangible, like a trophy?”
“I may be able to offer antique soap packets. They are as old as the station. I have an idea, actually. Can we rig anything to make lots of soap bubbles? Lots and lots of them?”
“Of course, but . . . Why.”
“We need more parties. More fun. We need joy, Lieutenant. I dream of flying, and it is the thing that brings me joy, and I dream of riding deep into the space between the Sagitarrius cluster and the Magellanic Cloud, out to the next leap into the Laika. I want to go farther than any man in history into those black depths, Sergeant. And I never will. This is the farthest I will travel. I try to reconcile that in my mind. I have told no one these things, you understand, and I trust you not to tell anyone. But I feel the darkness descend upon me. I feel the darkness, and I need to fill myself with energy and noise so I do not fall prey to it. We will have a biweekly party, to celebrate a long cycle. We will fill a long, empty hallway with
soap bubbles and put a plastic liner on the floor and walls and we will hold a contest to see who can slide themselves upon the liner the farthest.”
She chuckled. “Sir, that is ridiculous.”
“It will be fun. It will be a new tradition until the other officers shut us down. They will, Sergeant. In the meantime, there is a lot of useless soap lying around and plenty of plastic insulation lining. Call a biweekly meeting on the schedule and find a nice, long, empty hallway. When I first arrived, the room I was in under quarantine had packages of soap. Where are these oldest, most useless soaps in the entire universe? That is what we will use to make the hallway slippery.”
She was critical, but smiling. I was very pleased that I had the capacity to make her smile. “I will make it so, Lieutenant. Anything else?”
The tapes were still playing. I turned them off. “I don’t think so. If you ever reach the point, come to me, okay? I need you. I will help you in any way I can.”
She didn’t say anything to that. She saluted and she left.
Pleased with myself, and my whimsical command, I turned, then, to the duties of the quartermaster. I spent hours just flagging and approving work orders on my tablet. Then, I had to inspect work—much of it I knew nothing about, but Sergeant Anderson did. We walked the halls together, where she taught me what it took to keep the hull and pipes intact.
In what little time I had, after work, I played poker, always poker, with the other officers and any enlisted who merited an invitation to the table. At some point, it occurred to me that over half the time, the enlisted was involved in a bribe with one of the other officers. Obasanjo and Wong were both commonly involved, and occasionally Q or Nguyen, but only occasionally. That the admiral was receiving a bribe, in the person of Q, was disappointing to me, but I had long ago accepted that the whole situation was corrupt. And to what purpose all the extra credit in the bank? The planet economy was sparse. Being king of a desert dune seemed to me such a trivial thing. I accepted no bribes, but I am not proud to say it. I was often approached when I became quartermaster about possible favors and reassignments, always mentioning a poker game in passing. I pretended not to understand what the private or corporal was saying. The enlisted corps seemed to realize I was in that, at least, beyond reproach and left me to my own devices. A signal would pass between the betters, and the money would appear on the table in the form of chips, and at the end of the hand, the money would pass over to the officer who was being paid off. It was perfectly legal to do so, and no camera or recording device would flag anything untoward in a poor poker hand, and under the Q’s admiralcy, there was a dramatic uptick in Obasanjo’s wealth and status, while Wong smiled and cheerfully played his hand as if no one was busy trying to have a private bet, as if only to annoy Obasanjo.
Over poker, with a private sweating his hand against men who had little else to do but gamble at cards in the evenings, Q turned to me and casually mentioned my scheme to turn a hallway into an amusement park for a night.
“I do not approve of wasting supplies, Lieutenant Aldo. Have you considered the cost in water alone?”
“The water will be recycled quickly back into the system. The soap is ancient.”
“But it is still useful.” He threw two chips down. “I see you, Private. And you are in over your head. Get out while you can.”
“With respect, sir. I call.” He was a biotic scrubber, and one of mine, and I didn’t want to appear foolish in front of my own man.
“My unit has low morale. The mission is impacted. Not every soldier is content to train and pray, sir. They are not men like you.”
“And women,” said the admiral.
Wong surprised me by taking my side. “Sir, if I may offer a suggestion from history, when naval ships crossed the equator in the age of the British Empire, there was always a party of sorts, and an initiation. It was quite ribald, but it probably helped maintain order. Blew off some steam.”
“A festival, of sorts?”
“Yes, sir. And a ritual,” said Wong.
“Spacers have their rituals, Wong. I have never been interested in superstition.”
“I have no ritual in mind,” I said. “I am just trying to give my soldiers something to look forward to that wasn’t approved by the monastery first. We will clean up afterward. Nothing will be wasted.”
“You had better be sure. I want it all recycled in the tanks. No water loss. Even the soap goes back into the system. Faith and prayer are excellent rituals. I recommend them to anyone. We live on a monastic world, under monastic law for towns and villages. There are religious festivals we could share. Feast of the Resurrection, the Passover, and the holy fast at Ramadan. We could bring up a monk to serve as a counselor on a permanent basis.”
“No, thanks,” said Obasanjo. “I will take a soap slide over religion any day of the year. HR would never approve without all the officers on board, and I’m against it. Can I come to your soap party, Aldo?”
I shook my head. “The hallway will be crowded. Let us try it first. We can expand if it is successful.”
Q looked over at the private at the table. “Are you quite finished, Private?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. He folded his hand and stood up at stiff attention.
“I’m sitting right here. It isn’t like I don’t know. Who are you hiding it from, anyway?” The admiral threw his cards down face up. “Three aces. Anybody beat that?”
Nobody could. He gathered all the chits. “This is the last time,” he said, to the officers at the table. “After this, if I see it on the tapes, I take action. My station. My rules. No more of this. No more gambling of any kind. I have nothing against it, personally, but the way things happen here? No more.” He pocketed them. “I’m putting all of this money toward a fundraiser to bring more entertainment items here for the enlisted. I’m not keeping this money.” He pushed his way past us, and looked back into the room. “No more gambling. That’s an order.”
In the room afterward, everyone was silent for a time in the admiral’s absence.
Eventually, the private said, “We can keep playing. We just can’t bet anything, right?”
I laughed like a maniac. The men stared at me.
Wong stood up and placed his cards face up. He had four of a kind, all queens. That set off Obasanjo, and the rest of the room.
Another round, and another hand, but the chips meant nothing. We played without real money. It was all sport and pointless for personal gain. For a time, we continued to meet for poker. Without real money involved, it lost its luster. Bored, I stopped and Wong stopped and Obasanjo kept it going with some of the enlisted. Then, even that dwindled.
Lecture night began. A com link was set up to the monastery for weekly sermons with the theologians who argued over obscure heresies in the monastery. They took turns presenting on different topics of interest to only themselves. Officers were expected to attend to set an example for the enlisted. I confess that I paid little attention and preferred to sneak out the back with Sergeant Adebayo Anderson to catch up on work details that didn’t get done with our staffing shortage.
We clambered over the hull together, looking up into the darkness and stars, where the panels groaned and trembled. We bolted them down and soldered them in place with emergency stickies to last until the next certified hull jockey could get to it on the list. We did biotic sweeps together, blasting empty hallways with hot bleach and squirting the walls and corners with samples from our station’s approved biotic colonies. We climbed into the pipes and wires in the walls while our crewmen slept through lectures, picking up the coverage rate. It was hard work, but I actually enjoyed it. Her calm strength gave me calm strength. I learned the station’s secret chambers. We gained the kind of camaraderie that can only come from working together late into the evening.
Soon, in conversation with Sergeant Anderson, she made a joke I did not understand about the possibilities of shadowed closets while we were in one. I don’t recall what it was, but she
pointed out that two young men often lost a few minutes in their duties in the very dark closet we were sweeping while the rest of the crew were at a lecture or eating or resting in their bunks. “We should probably let them know their secret is not safe from HR.”
“What secret?”
She looked at me like I was not serious. She laughed and patted my head. “Ask your good friend, Amanda,” she said.
Confused, I did not know what to say. It took me a tremendous amount of time to understand what she meant. I had never lain with either a woman or a man. When it occurred to me, I arranged a meeting with the two young men after official shift. They were both in their fourth year of service, lean and strong from years of hard work. They were good-looking young men, and they were nervous about being in this meeting, with their commander, together. They were afraid that I knew. I played them the tape of their sojourn into a closet for thirteen minutes. I fast-forwarded through the long pause, saying nothing, but pointing to the time stamp.
Abashed, they looked at each other with mortified faces, one grinning a little and the other not. I told them only that they needed to be more discrete.
I told this story to Amanda in our endless written communications. She got hung up on a particular detail and did not allow me to finish my story.
You have never . . . Really?
When would I? On the boat with my mother and father? In War College where I could get in trouble for building relations with someone I would be leaving behind? Or up here, where there are four women out of nearly fifty men, two of them my direct subordinates?
That’s awful. I feel terrible for you.
Lust, oh, confessor, does not feel sinful at the time. I think there is a difference between harmful sexual attraction, like what I felt toward Sergeant Adebayo Anderson, and what I felt for Amanda. For the other women and men of the station, I felt nothing.
I spent a great deal of time with Sergeant Adebayo Anderson in my role as quartermaster. In fact, we were probably co-quartermasters, and all success I achieved must be attributed to her careful guidance. She handed me staffing reports that I did not quite understand. I signed them and got the work moving, then asked what I had signed and listened to her explanation. The only time I left my little desk was to join a work crew, when no other hand was available, and while I worked scraping and irradiating bulkheads, and checking the decay of wiring networks, I dreamed of darkness and stars. I came to fly, not scrub bulkheads with biotic technicians and repair clogged pipes. My only joy, then, was when Sergeant Anderson and I would finish the shift and send the workers on home, and we picked up the lingering jobs on the board together. It was pleasurable to be in close company with her, and to work together on wires and pipes and insulation lines. She was a calm, easy presence, and I felt her physical strength beside me like a dark star’s radiant heat.
The Fortress at the End of Time Page 16