“Nothing,” she said. “Everybody’s getting sent down. Word will be back here any minute now. People will know I was not being honest about my relationship with my husband. They will want to know why I did it.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation, Adebayo,” I said, almost whispering. “Is there anything I can do to help your situation?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She started to cry, but choked it down.
I was struck by her in the starlight, flummoxed by tears and emotions that were as mysterious to me as planting a garden in the dunes. I didn’t know the first thing about a woman’s tears—about anyone’s tears. That made me sad. I realized, naturally, that I had been sad for many years and I had never cried about it. I just endured it. Thinking about it made me want to cry, that I hadn’t. Here she was, this beautiful, strong woman in tears because soon everyone would know her marriage had ended and she hadn’t said anything to anyone about it. I was selfish. I was thinking so selfishly. I did cry, but I cannot say that I did it for the right reasons. I was sad for her. I was sad that she was sad. I was sad for myself, that I had endured so long here, risen up to some sort of ceremonial second-in-command position that felt as meaningless as anything I had ever done. Our miseries merged into a moment. We reached for each other, then, and we floated together, drifting away from the walls.
Our time together was going to be very short, both here and with what adultery there was to come. Soon after we finished crying, she pulled away from me, and I lingered in the smell of her tears on my shoulders, floating in space. I thought of Shui Mien, of Amanda Garcia, and of my mother. The smell of the saltwater is the smell of home—the sea spray smell of my mother at the helm while my father was working on the satellite lines. Her body was hard and strong—I mean Sergeant Anderson’s body—and I had to really think awhile on how it was that the strongest person I knew was so fragile underneath her uniform. She couldn’t even face her own divorce.
We held together and wept together. When it was done, her body trembled in mine like a child’s. I didn’t know what to do. I felt awful. Crying didn’t help. Her smell was intoxicating to me in my despair. I loved her beautiful skin, the smoothness of it and the darkness of it, like staring across a black horizon on the exterior walks of the station. I thought hard not about how to help her feel better, but about what I could do to make my own mood improve. This was selfishness, I confess. I should have thought harder for Adebayo, and what was actually best for her soul.
* * *
I know, when it all comes down to it, the great confession of my sin is not carnal, or even personal, but material. My criminal scheme wasted resources that other colonies needed, that did not belong to me. It was already born in my brain, lacking only the application of the human scenario that could make it so. I was going to commit a grave act against the limited resources of the many colonies, a violation of the trust placed in me as an officer. It was the only thing that would make sense to me after years and years of miserable work.
The idea for the human solution to my technical problem began when I was sitting over a bucket of my own body filth.
With the loss of so many maintenance techs in preparation for the ice comet’s arrival on the planet, parts of the ship would bend and break and remain unrepaired for weeks. The facilities on the officers’ deck were backed up and broken and on a list of emergency repairs that included oxygen systems and the power converter for the kitchen ovens. We did our business in buckets, for a time. And we were expected to manage our own buckets. I was issued a bucket that I would use to carry my own waste down to the bottom-floor algae tanks, where I would put on the leg braces and walk the bucket to the right tank for deposit. It was my personal bucket for the duration of the plumbing emergency. And, at my desk, I was being asked to fill in as the AstroNav while simultaneously working on the negotiations for transfers, because the ice comet had every available terminal preparing for the dangerous contingency situations of slowing down a comet to land and melt in the middle of a large plain on a desert world without kicking up a dust storm that could last a hundred years or more. I felt underutilized in the process. I was the most qualified person, the most experienced pilot in the entire Sagittarius galaxy, where the pool of candidates was notoriously slim. The admiral, instead, was personally leading the team that was coordinating the gentle descent. Drones attached to the comet, and accumulated upon it, all pushing at once to redirect the energy into the slowest possible descent. A large hole was dug out and covered in concrete to let the comet land where it would have something holding the dust down. The drones would first redirect the comet into a gentle orbit, then switch to total slowdown. Once gravity had the right trajectory and velocity, the drones would break off and return home.
And me? I had nothing to do with it. I was watching planning progress from a side monitor while working on negotiations. I was smelling my own filth in the broken station. I was lonely and exhausted and got a message from Wong to make sure to review emergency protocols because the admiral was ninety-two for goodness’ sake, and there was more to taking command of the station than I knew. In most cases, it was a simple transfer of authority, like when Admiral Diego shot himself. In some cases, it wasn’t. I read more of the protocols. What the ExO did if there was a situation that incapacitated the admiral, and damaged our signal line, and was an imminent threat to the station was fascinating to me. If the attack was bad enough, or sudden enough, the message needed to go through. Complex data and interpretation of the data and intelligence was needed. Ranking officers should, in an emergency of imminent death, push an emergency signal through all the ansibles, overriding all other signals. Sometimes, if the data merited a human interpretation of events, they would send someone through the signal.
Carrying my bucket downstairs, a thought appeared in my head. This plan I had considered and plotted for years was actually much simpler than I had anticipated because of the human problem of maintenance technicians on the surface, and the ice comet distracting everyone. If someone could do it, someone would, eventually. It might as well be me.
It was such a simple first step, too. I opened an old file in the AstroNav system and found one of the farthest of the probes in the darkness that extended out from the Sagittarius galaxy into the unimaginable void beyond. I searched for the things I had been mentally cataloging for nearly a decade. These things could be misconstrued as heading toward us on a militaristic sweep. I slipped into the back of the probe’s system on its slow, single-atom ansible connection. It was such a small probe, no larger than a cup of tea. It was old, too, likely sent off as soon as the battle was won, after whatever enemy ships might remain in our shared sky. I found a dead world there, hurtling in the dark, a huge block of metal and stone and black and chlorine ice spinning through the void between galaxies for a thousand years from some forgotten, lost star. An astronomical curiosity, truly, and worthy of close study for that alone. But, also, it was aimed toward the Milky Way, and would someday fall into the gravity of her spectral palm. I surged the little sensors from the back, and it set off an alarm in the AstroNav system. An EM pulse it was not, but the old sensors only knew they had felt a surge. I had spent enough time staring at the codes and interfaces of all these old machines, I could fake a surge. The probe died, going dark and taking evidence of the surge with it. The alert system can be easily accessed and tampered with by an accredited officer to prevent any anomalies and mistakes from entering the ansible network beyond one station. It could easily also be used to delete evidence that the officer was tampering with the probe short of a full archaeological investigation. In moments, my plan was in motion.
I called the admiral directly.
“Can this wait, Captain?”
“Probably not for long. There is no cause for alarm yet, Admiral, but you need to know and I am about to send you a report on it. A probe got flashed by EM.”
“What?”
“There is a large object out there unaffiliated with a
ny orbit trajectory, as of yet. It’s a little larger than Charon, actually, and it just surged a probe.”
“ETA?”
“We have time. It did not appear to be on active thrust. Sublightspeed. Even at lightspeed, we’d have time. If a probe was truly hit, they’re probably going to pick up the pace. If it’s them. It might not be them. The probe died before it could know what it was. It might be an anomaly, or a busted probe.”
“Are they back or not?”
“We don’t know,” I said. “We know a probe was hit with an EM pulse that surged it. That is what we know. Deep space is . . .”
“Well, it is a weird place between galaxies. I’ve lived here longer than you. I know that. We still need to check it out.”
“I recommend a full sortie, Admiral, to check it out for ourselves, and let them know, if it is them, that we know they are coming and they should turn around.”
“Our galaxy,” said the admiral. “Plenty of galaxies out there. Leave ours alone. Right. What was I doing? Okay, I want that report right now, and set up a trajectory based on known speeds and possible lightspeed intercept. I will check it. We need to get the ice comet down and stabilized. We need to get that done, first.”
“We have a month even at twice lightspeed, and they weren’t going lightspeed when they surged us, if it was them.”
“Anything else it could be?”
“A piece of wreckage, perhaps, with an old defense mechanism that still works? A magnetically overactive anomalous object that found its way to our probe in the gap of space? A free-floating pulse or mechanical issue in the probe and we are placing an interpretation upon events from limited knowledge.”
“Captain, when I left Earth on this ship a thousand years ago . . . God, so many of us died, Captain. So few survived the battle, when it came. So many died after the battle, too. I hope to God it is some anomaly.”
“We will know when we know, Admiral.”
“I am the only person in this galaxy or the next who has actually flown in wartime, Captain. I am going to take the ship out, and you are going to stay behind and build me another in case it is the enemy. I will pass word up the chain. We are the vanguard colony. We are the tip of the sword of mankind. We will not let them back into the colonized worlds.”
“We don’t even know if it’s them yet, Admiral. We just don’t know. Why risk your knowledge?” I actually wanted her to go, for once. This was a situation where I win no matter what. I go and I get to fly the warship, finally. I stay, I get to transcend, finally.
“I am going on sortie, Captain. If it is them, I am already ninety-two years old. My children are fine. I pray to God it’s not them, Captain. I want a skeleton crew on my vessel, and no one who isn’t completely expendable to general ops. We put up a good front, act like we’re robust. Maybe they reconsider coming back.”
“Deep space is strange. It is too early to start panicking. We have limited knowledge.”
“Who’s panicking?” she said. “Send me the trajectory and a full report on the flash.”
“It would help me compile a report on the flash if any of the scientists and researchers could explain the enemy to me. Nothing makes sense about them. There are so many planets, so many galaxies. Why did they come for us? What do they even look like? What does anything in their weird ships . . .”
“How do they even work? I don’t know. No one can explain it beyond rudimentary signals and the impact of weaponry. I am trying to land an ice comet to save this colony. I will read the report and I want you to get to work on the ansible with materials personnel to pull in the parts for a new warship. Work it in quietly, with the colonist stuff. Pretend you’re hiding it from me. We need new parts, anyway.”
“On it, ma’am.”
“Shit. Shit shit shit. Hey, keep this between you and me, right now. This is confidential. You and me. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Shit. Shit.”
She hung up. I got to work on the plan. Such a simple thing, my transgression. I had never felt so alive. The nature of sin is to steal God’s energy, to steal His power to be in control of reality and self. I have had long discussions about this with Brother Pleo since my incarceration. I felt powerful, exhilarated, and in control. For the first time in my career, I had rediscovered the feeling I felt beneath the mesquite tree before my first transcendence. I felt like a future was out there, waiting for me to take it.
I prepped the necessaries, and watched the meteor land with a calm excitement, disconnected from the events on the screen.
Sergeant Anderson asked to meet me for a workout in the low floors, where we had first met. She said that we both had a lot of stress to burn off. I asked her how her crew was doing with the pipes, when I met her there. I had my bucket with me. I wish I could have left it at my desk, not taken it down with Adebayo, but it needed to be done, and appearances mattered.
“There’s something different about you,” she said. “It’s disturbing, actually, and you need to get some exercise and burn it off.”
“What’s different?”
“You’re smiling a little now. It’s just a little, at the corners of your mouth. But it is really strange and disturbing.”
“Well, I’m sorry it bothers you. I wouldn’t mistake it for happiness, considering the situation.” I meant, of course, the war I was starting, but it wasn’t the war she interpreted. I finished my legs, and picked the bucket up again.
She pointed at my bucket. “It is a situation, indeed. Sorry. We’re backlogged landing the ice comet. I’m doing my best. We need to eat, exercise, and sleep or we’ll be worse off. Oh, technically, you’re here to help me with a job. I brought you some extra tools.”
“It’s actually a good idea to expand jobs to anyone qualified in their off hours, regardless of specialization. We could post a message board and offer extra data access to volunteers who finish tasks to your satisfaction.”
She shook her head. “No, we will not. I have enough supervising already. We cannot afford any meaningful mistakes from well-intentioned amateurs with our systems while so many are on the surface. We do our best and triage jobs. Let’s go for a walk.”
We went to the open cistern for sewage. The contents did not smell once it was thrown into the cistern. There were powerful biotic agents developed for station use that took care of the smell, mostly. It smelled musty, human, like sweaty sheets left unwashed. It was not a wholly unpleasant smell compared to how a one-thousand-liter tank of fermenting human filth should stink. The buckets stank, but I was going to leave the bucket beside the tank for a cleaning crew to handle in the morning. I was spared the indignity of hosing out my bucket. Clean buckets were lined up next to the dirty ones. It reminded me of places I had seen as a child, filthy under-cities where my family’s boat would occasionally find the shadow of airports and train stations along the shore. The illegal slums were cheap places for harbor when Dad wasn’t finding good contracts, and Mom couldn’t get a buyer for her design work. I had thought War College would take me away from the filth of life.
But, inside of me, I knew I was going to transcend. Knowing this, I could feel a hope that I did not see in Sergeant Anderson.
“Why did you keep his name?” I said.
“What?”
“I’m just curious. It’s not really any of my business. You could have changed your name back. You don’t owe me an explanation if you do not wish to give it.”
“Ask him. He is the one who took my name. Before we married, his name was O’Conner,” she smiled, sadly. “I think he got used to everyone calling him this name, and he was a clone, anyway. Our lives actually began here, together, not somewhere else. Memory is just the story we tell ourselves. That is what Obasanjo said, and I think there is a truth in it. Even if Jon and I are no longer together, we were together so much and formed so much of each other’s place here. That is what I think. I will have to ask him when I see him again.”
“Oh,” I said. We stood there,
in this long pause. She looked away from me, to the tank. I looked at her beautiful face. I remembered my time with Amanda, and I could not deny my deeply felt pull toward this sad woman, with her body as muscular as any security officer and the tenderness of a long sadness at the edges of her smiles. I would be eternal soon. I was already a sinner. What pain I might cause Amanda was, to me, an inconvenience. The woman I wanted—the life I wanted here on this planet—was with Master Sergeant Anderson. I took her hand in mine, lifted her palm up to my face, and kissed her wrist. She did not stop me.
“I see,” she said.
“I do not mean to offend you,” I said. “I do not mean to cause you pain or ask anything that you aren’t willing to give.”
“It is not to be, but perhaps,” she said. She looked down the curving architecture away from me. “It is possible that I could be convinced, Captain. You are in my chain of command, are you not?”
“I am in everyone’s chain of command. Please don’t hold it against me. We can keep things quiet for a long time. There’s plenty of time.”
“There is,” she said. She pulled her hand away. “No need to rush anything, Captain.”
“Of course not,” I said. Inside, my heart was beating so fast it was dancing. I felt so alive. We raced each other to the other end of the station, laughing all the way. I lost. Of course I lost. She often walked down here without bracers to build strength. She did push-ups and pull-ups here, where gravity was hard enough that a single, clean pull-up was a challenge. I was only there to place a bucket down until the pipes were fixed.
Uplifted with the endorphines of exertion, we extracted ourselves from the braces at the elevator door.
“When will I see you again off duty?” she said to me.
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow,” she said. She nodded. “What will we do tomorrow? Do you have a plan to win my heart, Captain Aldo?”
“I will come up with one between now and tomorrow.”
“Make it three days. I deserve a decent plan, Captain.”
The Fortress at the End of Time Page 21