Eclipse

by K. A. Bedford

  I clasped my moist hands in front of me, feeling ­awful. “Yes that was me, alone inside the ship of the damned!”

  Sorcha laughed, and it didn’t sound forced. She invited me to sit; I dragged a chair from a nearby empty table and occupied the empty side. I noticed Richards eased further over to the wall. Sorcha smiled, trying to cover the difficulty here through force of personality. “Alastair is one of the techs involved in fixing the alien ship’s engine.”

  He looked at me. He didn’t look like someone who wanted to talk shop. I said, “You were over there, too? What were your impressions?”

  He smiled thinly. “I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. If you ask me, the whole thing’s a loss, a damned ghost-ship!”

  Sorcha was watching me. I said to him, “Why do you say that?”

  He looked uncomfortable, fiddling with his empty cup. “Like you said, Dunne, that whole ship is full of corpses. It’s a flying graveyard! I don’t know how you could bring yourself to go inside it.” He avoided eye contact; his voice tight.

  “I, well, I didn’t have much choice. I was just ordered to go in, and I went… It sure as hell wasn’t my idea, I can tell you that.” I tried to smile, to show I was more on his side than he obviously thought.

  Richards scowled, uncomfortable. “God, you wouldn’t catch me going in there. I think I’d mutiny first.”

  Trying again, I said, smiling, “Trust me, I gave that idea serious thought!” I managed a few scruffy rags of laughter.

  Impervious to such charm as I had, he said, “I’m just glad the captain wasted the bastards. Best thing he could’ve done, if you ask me. Best thing!”

  Sorcha looked at him, surprised. She said, “How can you say that, Alastair? It’s not like they were any kind of threat to us!”

  He went on, his voice quite serious, “You must’ve heard the rumors, that the captain felt them in his mind, that they were trying to take him over, make him a drone. I say he acted just in time!”

  This comment got to me. It reminded me of what Rudyard had said that night, that they were in his mind. That he had been drawn to the tank, the way I had been drawn there, even without knowing what was happening, or where I was going. I had just wound up there, and it felt right. It was a chilling thought — yet also somehow silly. I told myself that Rudyard had done a great wrong in killing those creatures, but now I found myself ­wondering if they were planning to take over the ship, claiming our minds one by one. What if the captain had done the right thing? What if, and this stuck in my throat, Richards was right, and the captain was some kind of hero?

  “I didn’t like having those filthy bastards on board. They gave me the creeps. We should’ve left the survivors where they were and carried on.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but these creatures might well have been sentient beings like ourselves. While that ­possibility existed, we couldn’t have just let the last of them die. It wouldn’t have been right.”

  “They’re bloody bugs, Dunne! From what I’ve seen, they’re just oversized cockroaches, and I’ll thank you, Mr. SSO1, not to suggest that we have anything in common with the likes of filth like that.” I could hear his breathing, a nasty hissing through his nostrils, while the veins in his neck bulged with his tension.

  “Oh,” I said, taking my cue to shut the hell up, and feeling cold. I looked at Sorcha who seemed pained. I imagined her wanting Richards and me to get on well, because we had this thing with the alien ship in common. Honest enough mistake. Nobody said anything for a few moments.

  Sorcha looked at her small, long-fingered hands. She said, “So, James, what’s new with you?”

  Richards pushed his cup to one side and moved to get up. “Excuse me, love. I’ve got some stuff to do in the core.”

  She was surprised. I wasn’t. I watched him get up. He nodded to me, “Mr. Dunne,” waved to Sorcha, and left.

  “Alastair?” she said, watching him go.

  He called her “love.” I felt myself burn to ash with suppressed anger. And, feeling this, felt stupid, like I was twelve years old all over again, and having to carry bags and heavy sweaters in front of me all the time, unable to think coherent thoughts for the deafening hormonal noise in my head. For God’s sake, I was twenty-one years old, I was grown up, I should be fine if Sorcha wanted to chat with someone. And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe Sorcha and I did have, I don’t know, at least the beginning of something going on. We liked each other’s company, swapped mail constantly, talked non-stop over dinner when our shifts permitted.

  And yet, we hadn’t had a self-defense workout in a few weeks, and neither of us had suggested starting it up again.

  “You did say the guys in engineering were assholes,” I said, looking at where Richards had sat.

  She shrugged and smiled laconically. “I had thought some might improve with further exposure.”

  “While others just reveal their true colors.”

  Sorcha looked pensive. “Yes, well, there is that. I ­certainly didn’t expect that outburst from him. Of all the guys down in engineering, he’d been the only one I had thought was a bit civilized. Treated me pretty well, let me do my job my own way, watched his mouth, didn’t try to cop a feel every time I went by.”

  “I can see his wild appeal, then.” I smiled.

  “It’s not that. His conversation isn’t much, ­xenophobic notions notwithstanding, but this seems to be the kind of ship where if you’re a woman who’s somehow with a guy in a place like engineering, the other bastards will tend to leave you alone.”

  I remembered hearing about this kind of tactic at the Academy. Problems set in when the guys realized they were being used mainly as protection from harassment, and not because the lady appreciated their finer points.

  “I could use some coffee,” I muttered, getting up, and anxious to conceal the turmoil in my head. It had been a wretched twenty-four hours.

  “You all right?”

  I turned back to her, frowning. “I feel like crap, to be honest.” I went off to fetch some coffee from the fab. As usual it looked like some kind of hot coffee-flavored ­effluent. Sitting again, yawning, I looked at Sorcha. “Do I look as awful as I feel?”

  “I’m sorry about Alastair.”

  I coughed, smiling a little. “Guys like me will never get on with guys like Alastair, Sorcha. Doesn’t help that I have the stain of Otherness all over me. Seems like every other person on this ship thinks I’m somehow contaminated. Everywhere I go, people avoid me, as if I’m carrying some disease or something.”

  “That’s bullshit!”

  I was blowing on my steaming coffee. “And now I’m going to be involved in the captain’s fall.”

  “James?” She scratched at her vermilion mohawk.

  I told her about my interview with Lily Riordan, and added, “She says, cryptically, that you were right to be ­concerned about Ferguson, by the way.”

  Sorcha leaned back in her chair, eyes wide. “That so?”

  “Where is the captain, anyway?” I asked, daring a sip of the coffee and getting a scalded tongue for my trouble.

  “Confined to quarters while Riordan investigates. Ferguson, meanwhile, is likewise locked in his quarters, running the ship over the cloud, even more obsessive about details, regs, formalities, and procedures than usual. Last I heard he was hissing orders. Hissing!”

  I shook my head, and blew on the coffee some more. “Looks like I’m locked out of the Contact Team feed, too.”

  Sorcha nodded. “There are rumors in engineering about the scientists having hissy fits over the loss of the specimens. Blaming each other, bitching about whose fault it is.”

  “The usual, in other words,” I said, recognizing this pattern.

  She smiled. “The usual.”

  “You think the captain’s really go
nna get the boot?” I asked.

  Sorcha didn’t answer immediately, her eyes locked on the display panels. A few panels had feeds from outside, showing Queen Helen. She was a huge ship, bigger than Eclipse. Queen Helen was almost a traveling habitat, with its own squadrons of fighters, recon observer ships, early-warning controller ships, and light destroyers tucked deep inside her flight-deck. The whole ship was a colossal, blocky thing, more than two kilometers long, and almost half a k through the middle at the widest point. She carried a crew complement of about four hundred human officers, and countless disposables.

  Finally, she said, “Hard to say. If the Service was run according to the principles it advertises in its brochures, I’d say Captain Rudyard would be lucky to command an orbital tug after this.”

  “But we know,” I said, “that those lofty principles of justice and fair play are just advertising copy, don’t we?”

  She flashed a cynical grin. “What happens to the captain, James, will depend on who he knows, and what favors he can pull in.”

  A scary thought occurred to me: “What if he gets away with it?”

  Sorcha laughed. “Oh right! Sure!”

  I was about to elaborate on this chilling thought when I heard the new-mail ping in my head. I excused myself for a moment while I checked it. And having checked it, I felt as if my face was falling off my head in shock.

  “James? What’s—?”

  I was staring at those panels displaying Queen Helen. “I just got a note from Admiral Greaves’ appointments ­secretary. Greaves wants an urgent chat with me — now!”

  Eleven

  During the trip over in Eclipse’s boat, I wondered what an admiral’s quarters might be like. I thought perhaps she’d have a disposable assistant and perhaps a separate sleeping area from the work area. Not only did Admiral Greaves have a suite of rooms like something out of a fancy ­hotel, but she had a staff of actual human crew running her affairs.

  Two armed executive security guards, both real humans, met me in an otherwise empty hangar deck when I disembarked from the boat. I squinted against the dull white glare from overhead light bars and looked down at the red glow from the bay markings on the deck. The hangar air was thick with the smell of thruster propellant. The popping sound of the boat’s hull adjusting to the temperature difference was surprisingly loud. The security guys escorted me through narrow, gray passageways, thronged with human officers and enlisted disposables alike, down a series of lifts and companionways until, at length, we arrived; and the two guards handed me over with great formality to another set of guards outside the admiral’s door.

  Queen Helen’s ShipMind had sent me an information packet containing all the necessary orientation materials for important guests. I could call up a three-dimensional map of the immense ship’s labyrinths that would show me exactly where I stood, but I didn’t feel lost, at least not in a purely physical sense. Standing there, going through the formality of identification and presentation, with all that crisp saluting and standing at attention, and trying not to think about how my uniform shirt was itching my neck, I felt a sense of awe and fear. What the hell was I doing here, about to see an admiral? Sure, she sent for me, but it seemed unreal.

  I remembered when I was in school, before the Academy, and I was doing a class in theater. One day I had to go on stage for the first time, do an actual one-man performance piece, and face my first audience, the other students. Like a moron, I hadn’t understood the merits of volunteering to go first with such things, and had elected instead to go last, and thus had the pressure of all the other performances weighing on me, making me feel so much worse. I still remember the smell of the back-stage area, reeking of fresh-cut pinewood and cheap paint. Those few minutes, standing in the wings, waiting for my cue and wanting to vomit, flashed back into my mind now as I waited for the guards to admit me into the hot glare of the admiral’s presence.

  The door was opened for me and I was shown to a ­receptionist interface officer working behind a desk, consulting several sheets of Active Paper. He acknowledged my presence and asked me to please take a seat; the ­admiral would see me shortly. I sat in one of the plush seats nearby, feeling like I was about to see my doctor. From time to time a senior officer would come in, nod to the receptionist, and go straight on through one of the three large doors leading further into the admiral’s suite. At one point three such officers, all of them Spacecraft Command Level 6 or above, left through one door talking animatedly about something. I felt like a piece of bleeding baitfish trying to avoid the notice of sharks.

  An SCO4 female officer appeared at the door, smiled at me, and said those dreaded words, “SSO1 Dunne? The admiral will see you now.”

  “Mr. Dunne! How good of you to come! Please, come in.” The admiral met me at the door, shook my hand with what felt like real warmth, and, hand on my back, escorted me to a comfortable couch next to a low coffee table. A couch! Her simple gray steel businesslike desk was several paces away, nothing fancy.

  Admiral Greaves asked me, “Could I interest you in a hot beverage, perhaps?” She asked as if my answer was something she actually wanted to know. I frowned, confused, and declined her offer — and immediately wondered if I had done the right thing. The admiral smiled, and arranged herself a cup of strong black coffee, using real ground beans and what looked like an antique plunger. The aroma of it, after all the fabbed coffee I had consumed over the years, was almost too much to bear. She poured with her back to me and said in a surprisingly deep voice clipped with formality, “What do you think of our flagship, Mr. Dunne?” Strange to notice that even in the act of making coffee, she stood so straight, her bearing formidable. I imagined that, being a small person and a woman she’d had to work hard to make others take her seriously.

  I flapped my mouth several moments before saying, “She’s a beautiful ship, ma’am. So big! It’s hard to think about.” This remark, once out of my mouth, embarrassed me. What a dumb thing to say! So big? I could have shot myself.

  She turned, sipping at her coffee from a blue ceramic mug marked “Caroline’s Mug,” and sat on a couch opposite the coffee table. Despite her petite stature, she dominated the room with her gaze. I noticed the blotched, leathery quality of her facial skin and scalp, which reminded me of the story I heard years ago about Caroline Greaves, and how during a routine solo mission with a ship’s boat she had been obliged to climb outside it for a manual system repair, and her environment suit suffered a non-critical failure. She was exposed to hard radiation from the local system star for three hours before she got the ship’s boat operational again. She had refused the offered commendation.

  Greaves said to me, glancing around the enormity of this room, “She’s certainly nothing like I ever expected to see when I was an SSO1.”

  “Those must have been great days,” I said, saying more or less the expected comment when in the presence of a reminiscing senior officer.

  But I was surprised by what she said in reply: “Of course, that was back when human space was still more or less a cohesive political and economic cooperative, before we started splitting up into all these groups.”

  Forty years ago, more or less. She had probably served on one of the old Zeppelin-class patrol ships, over-engineered clunkers whose duty mainly consisted of protecting trade lanes and ferrying troops, diplomats, and ­settlers. Such ships could push themselves to forty percent of lightspeed, and the crews had to deal with all the ­miseries of relativistic travel. Things took a long time to happen.

  “Didn’t the Kestrel Event bring about the fracturing of human space” I said, recounting old wisdom.

  She sipped her coffee. “It certainly put the fear of God through everyone — literally. Fear of all kinds of things. Fear makes people turn inward and look askance at foreigners. Suddenly you’re looking at the politics of us and them. Whatever happened at Kestrel, it was invisible, t
he worst kind of enemy. When you’re up against something you can’t see, everybody else suddenly looks like they might be an enemy agent. Wretched business. This new development won’t help matters, either.”

  I thought about what Sorcha said in her letter about the tsunamis of information that would crash through human space when word of this new event spread. Saying nothing, I let the admiral talk.

  “Doesn’t it seem strange to you,” she said, “that you and I serve the Home System Community? We’re a ­minority in the total scheme of things, yet we make the most noise about how we stand for what is good and just and right for everyone. No wonder the others laugh at us.”

  I hadn’t expected this in our meeting. Sitting there, my hands in my lap, I wondered what I might say, or if I was meant to say anything at all. When I had received the admiral’s note back on Eclipse, I assumed she wanted to talk about either my disturbing adventure aboard the alien vessel, or the strange business of Captain Rudyard killing the aliens. Maybe both. I said, trying for a non-controversial attitude, “I had sometimes wondered about this, myself, Admiral.”

  She studied me over the rim of her coffee mug. Her green-eyed gaze impaled me, making me feel like an ­interesting insect. “Indeed? And what did you conclude?”

  I hesitated. “Ma’am?”

  She flashed me another smile. “Your captain speaks highly of you, Mr. Dunne. And the ­reports from Dr. Grantleigh of the Contact Team tell me you’re an officer with a good brain in his head.”

  Despite a suddenly dry mouth, I said, “May I speak freely, ma’am?”

  The admiral looked surprised that I asked. She nodded.

  I said, unsure of myself, “I just figured that things at the level of nation-states take a long time to change, while things at the level of individual people change quickly.”