Back in the present I had a bit of luck: nobody was going by at that particular moment. I went to the head, got cleaned up, and thought Caroline never told me her little toy would do this!
It was time she and I had a word.
I showed up for my chunder that evening, feeling as much like my regular self as possible. Rather than go back to the Infirmary, as Hinz suggested, I spent the afternoon in an out-of-the-way rec area, plugged into one of ShipMinds’s music channels, trying to sort out what was going on in my head. It didn’t really help.
This spyware, I kept thinking, might be real trouble.
I sat there for a few minutes. What to do? Most of my instincts were telling me to dump the spyware. It shouldn’t be a problem; I’d just do a hard system eject, as Caroline had told me. On the other hand, suppose all this crap I was getting from Rudyard’s head had nothing to do with the spyware? What if dumping the software made no difference? I’d lose my means of getting into Rudyard’s head and getting the info Caroline wanted, and I’d still be getting these horrific memory-flashes. Probably the first time I entered the captain’s head I had received all that rape stuff in a huge chunk, and it was only now starting to unfurl into something comprehensible. Maybe he was getting these flashes, too. Personally, I hoped the guilt and wretchedness ate his guts away. Bad enough that I was feeling like this, and I hadn’t even been involved!
Yet a small voice in the back of my head was whispering at me: so what would you call uninvited entry into a man’s most private thoughts? Bloody hell, I didn’t need that. Maybe what I did need was to visit the Infirmary, after all. But as soon as I thought that, I remembered my previous experiences with Service counselors.
So instead I went to dinner, determined to eat my way to forgetful calm. A big meal seemed like a good idea after spending three days unconscious. I was even considering having a double serving of the dreaded space chunder. Arriving at the chow line, I stood behind a few guys from environmental management; I didn’t think I knew them. Looking around, I saw the Mess was full. Then I noticed several faces staring at me. Why were these people looking at me? I wondered. And wondered, too, why they looked so sour, even angry? A few, I noticed, nudged their neighbors in the arm, and nodded towards me. This made others look, too, and there were more dark glances in my direction. Then the guy ahead of me in the line turned and saw me. “Dunne, well, well, well,” he said. He was an officer named Allsop.
I tried on a smile I didn’t feel. “Allsop. Hi.”
He just stared at me, then shook his head and turned away, like I was too disgusting even for conversation. This was a familiar gambit. I knew this one from the Academy, with the senior cadets looking down their noses at the juniors, who were beneath contempt. I decided Allsop could go screw himself for all I cared.
But it was those others around the room, staring, who worried me. They looked, with their cold unwelcoming gazes, like a mob.
Screw ‘em, I thought. I had bigger problems. Tomorrow morning, I planned to see Lily Riordan before reporting to Janning. She’d get a full statement on what happened three days ago, and while I was at it, I’d tell her what else Ferguson had been making me do, including the business with making me towel him off after showers, and his veiled threats of a more personal nature. It was a huge, terrifying step to take. For a long moment I stood there, shivering, feeling sick in my guts at the thought of what I was planning. Reporting Ferguson would be close to the worst thing I could do in terms of “rocking the boat”. The Service provided legal channels through which complaints against senior officers could be lodged, but these channels were almost never used. The reprisals, for one thing, could be devastating. The comprehensive beating I got for my adventure on Day One would be trivial by comparison. It would almost certainly be time to shove me out the airlock, though I might escape with only a “personal visit” from Mr. Ferguson, wearing nothing but a towel. “Rat me out to the Service, will you, Mr. Dunne?”
And, suddenly, as I received my plateful of chunder, it occurred to me just why the captain and Ferguson might protect each other. Oh God.
I decided to just sit at the first table I saw with an empty seat. Approaching one table, I noticed a few of the officers there, a mixed group of five Security Team people, turn to look at me. It was the look you shoot at someone who farts during a formal dinner and laughs about it. They got up as I sat, meals unfinished, coffee untouched.
I ate my chunder, not tasting it. I was starting to feel ill, and embarrassed. As I ate, people at tables near me got up and left, their meals also unfinished. Not a word was spoken anywhere in the room. I was cold all over, and I was sure everyone was looking my way.
But I kept eating, determined not to show whatever emotion it was they expected from me. Was it fear? Why? What had I done this time? I’d been unconscious three days; how could I have done anything? That business where people avoided me after my time on the alien ship — surely that couldn’t still be bothering people! That was old news, to me at least. I now hardly ever dreamed about those lightless tunnels, and the things I imagined lying in wait for unprepared, low-ranking humans. These people looked much more upset, and more hostile, over this current thing than they had over my brush with alienness.
Forcing myself to keep calm, I ate every damn thing on my plate, and I took my time about it, mopping up every bit of gravy with vatbread. I considered going back for seconds, just to show these bastards. But getting up to return my tray, I tripped as I turned on my left boot; the tray fell; I stood and watched it happen, thinking, dismayed, Bloody perfect!
The plate and empty juice glass shattered; cutlery jangled against the floor. The noise was deafening in the silent Mess. I felt everyone stare. Staring down at the broken ceramics and glass, I saw the nano coating on the floor absorb the shards. I knelt carefully and picked up the tray, the cutlery, and fed them into the tray return.
I left. I felt cold, embarrassed, and alone. What I wanted most of all right now was to see Sorcha, and I kept wondering where she was and why I hadn’t heard back from her. It seemed obvious now that she had, for whatever reason, had second thoughts about me. And why wouldn’t she, really? Someone like her, someone like me … these things didn’t happen. The universe had rules about who could be with whom.
Then the thought occurred to me: what if Ferguson had gotten someone to inoculate me, while I was unconscious, with a headware system virus or spyware program? I checked my headware system files again and again as I headed back to my quarters. Every time, no matter what I tried, they came up worryingly clean.
There was a ShipMind announcement: “All hands, prepare for tube entry, in one minute.”
This would be the final tube ride before reaching our destination. Already I could feel the quiet hum of the ship’s power plant as we boosted up to tube entry velocity. It was time to find an acceleration couch. There was still no word about why we were going to this particular system. Exploratory missions generally dropped out into open interstellar space, within probe distance of a group of other systems. Targeting one particular system so far out of the normal routine of exploration looked strange, even bizarre.
But it wasn’t for me to question senior command staff. They must, I figured, have good reasons for taking the ship all the way out here, further than any humans had been.
I found an acceleration couch in the lounge area next to the Mess. It was hard trying not to think of the power involved in pushing a vessel this big so fast. It was something I had never really thought about before. Suddenly in my mind I saw power and velocity mapped out on a curve, and with it the chance of successful tube entry at each point on the curve mapped separately. “Ohhh…” I said to myself. Some of my sim work was coming to the surface. I was getting the feel for how the ship should handle under different levels of boost, how that power plant hum should sound, and I knew that there was a sweet spot in the engine note tha
t meant we were ready to hit the entry point.
There were a few others there ahead of me, sitting in one of the clusters, talking, sounding a little worried. They shut up as soon as I came in, but I ignored them. I found myself a couch on the other side of the room, and just had time to check the auto-restraints when we entered the tube.
Eclipse slipped from the tube back into normal space four minutes later, still packing colossal kinetic energy. The seat grabbed me and held me tight as the ship turned over and began braking; I felt giddy and a little queasy as the artificial-g adjusted.
We came in high over the system plane, out beyond the furthest planet, braking at 1.5 g.
Here we had an unremarkable, hot yellow star.
My phone rang. “Dunne,” I answered, keeping my voice quiet.
It was Ferguson’s unwelcome voice. He sounded … strange. “Listen, I understand you’re up and about again.”
I closed my eyes. Already I felt tense and angry. Too angry to notice what was wrong here. “Thank you for your concern, sir.”
“Listen, Mr. Dunne, would you mind popping by my quarters?”
“Mr. Ferguson, sir?” I said hesitantly. He had to know I’d be recording everything. He probably was, too, and for the same reasons.
“In your own time.” He killed the link. I sat, blinking in an awkward tangle of anger and confusion.
He let me in when I knocked on his door.
“Good of you to come, son. Starting to worry about you,” he said, brandy strong on his breath. I noticed he was wearing a white hotel bathrobe with insignia from the esteemed Hotel Venus de Luxe, Hellespont, Mars.
Known, where I came from, as Shag City.
I said, “I stopped at the head, sir.”
“That fall of yours,” he said, closing his door and turning to me, “gave us quite a start, you know.” He had an evil grin. His eyes looked darker than I had seen them before; the pupils were dilated. There was a fine sheen of sweat showing through his steel-gray buzz cut.
“I suppose I’m just a clumsy lad, sir,” I said, keeping a wary eye on him, and on my surroundings. No need to guess what he had in mind. With his door locked, there was no way out of here. Not even a window offered access to the mercy of vacuum. On his desk stood the bottle of brandy. It looked like the kind of cheap stuff one might get in the gift shop of a dive like the Venus de Luxe. I noticed there was only one glass; it was smudged and looked sticky.
So the only real advantage I had here was sobriety. Marvelous.
Rudyard could have a man executed for breaking regs, if they were broken in a suitably spectacular manner. Rudyard didn’t like the boat being rocked. This from the man who got an award for killing the only alien life forms humanity has ever encountered. He might not appreciate a junior officer attacking the ship’s executive officer, even in self-defense.
“You look a little tense, James,” Ferguson said.
I shot him a look. James? He called me James?
This was bad. I saw the whole thing in a flash. The rest of the crew treats me like scum, while Ferguson chums up to me like my long-lost best friend. And Ferguson feels so generous because he’s got everyone else terrified of his reprisals if they act against him in any way. So, no witnesses to his attack on me, even though it was in front of a room full of people. It was, in a way, the old, good cop, bad cop routine.
“It’s been kind of a big day,” I said nervously.
He said, taking a step towards me, away from the door, “I’m sure it has, my boy. How’s the head?”
Just fine, I thought, other than the huge bloody boot print pressed into it. “Coming along, sir.” I answered.
“Incredible what the docs can do these days, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.” I shuddered as discreetly as I could.
“Would you perhaps care for a small nip of brandy? Help you relax.” He was flashing an attack-dog smile at me.
“I try not to drink, sir, but thank you anyway.”
I took another step, this time towards his brandy. He poured a slosh of sticky red muck into the glass. It looked glutinous and dark. “One sip won’t hurt you, son. Help make you feel better after the day you’ve had.”
Christ, I thought, do I really look that stupid, that I would go along with this?
“I’ve just had dinner. I’m kind of full. Another time, perhaps.” I kept close to the door. The truth was, however, that there was only a limited amount of room in here. Three steps would take you from one wall to the one opposite.
“What are you so worried about, James?”
I thought about saying, “You and your wayward prick, sir,” but thought better of it. Instead I decided to say, “Mr. Ferguson, may I ask a question of you?”
He flashed a big grin. “Of course, son. I’m always happy to help the junior officers. What is it?”
I wished I could stop shivering. “Sir, what are we doing out here, in this system?”
He hadn’t been expecting that, I saw. His face shifted, like land wrenched by an earthquake. “This system?”
“This system, sir. We’re more than 280 lightyears out from the Home System. More than a hundred lightyears beyond the edge of known space.”
“That,” Ferguson said, picking up the brandy glass, holding it between his hands, swirling the plonk around, “is a sound observation, James.”
“As I understand it, sir, the Service’s Protocol on Astrographic Mapping and Surveys prescribes that exploration be carried out in a rather more systematic fashion.”
He sipped the brandy, made a show of enjoying it. He said, “Something came up.”
“Something came up, sir?”
“Yes,” he said, trying to maintain the front of geniality despite obvious bristling. “So tell me, how goes your training? I gather you’re almost finished your bridging program.”
“That’s correct, Mr. Ferguson.” I was standing at parade rest, determined to show I wasn’t fooled by all this bonhomie.
“Looking forward to joining the Helm Team? Quite a thrill, your first manual tube shot, I’m told.”
“So the captain has suggested. I’m sure it will be most exciting.”
He sipped his brandy again, peering at me over the glass rim. He looked like he was trying to figure something out.
“James, you asked me a rather forthright question just now. Would you mind if I asked you one?”
I couldn’t suppress the feeling of surprise that he would preface a question like this. He looked quietly satisfied to have put me off-balance.
“Sir?”
“James,” he said, looking at the floor, taking two casual steps across the room, “James, you and I really got off on the wrong foot, didn’t we?”
I edged closer to the door. To my right was his desk. To my left, a small, narrow closet and his small fab unit. This was not good. I tried to sidle towards the desk.
“I’m sure you were just doing your job, sir.”
“Of course, of course. But that’s really no excuse for making your life wretched, is it? I remember my first ship posting, the light cruiser Caledonia. Long time ago now. She was an old ship at the time, too. My very first day, my very first bloody day, I somehow managed to get up the nose of the XO, just like you did.” He paused, smiling, as if at the fickleness and irony of the universe. “Bastard called McPhee, built like one of those old fusion plants, big and just about indestructible, built to last.”
I said nothing, determined not to show a flicker of interest in his story. He went on, taking further sips from his brandy. He was close to me now, his breath was rank and hot. “Burner McPhee, we called him. Right bastard he was, too. One time he had us out scrubbing the stern radiator mesh assemblies, and word came through that the ship was going to do some low-output engine tests.” He grinned
, shaking his head. “Well, we knew what that meant. Newbie’s extra-crispy! And they actually took the plant through the pre-ignition cycle, got the first and second-stage injectors onstream, established magnetic containment. We could hear McPhee’s orders going through to Engineering, and when the Engineering bastards responded, we could hear the systems powering up, we could feel the hum through the hull — and there we were, a sorry bunch of losers, trying like mad bastards to get the hell back to the lock! I still remember McPhee’s laughter when he saw us and the looks on our faces. I swore I was going to kill him.”
My resolve weakened. “What did you do?”
“McPhee and I had a drinking contest. Bastard won, too.” I could see the memory of this still rankled him.
“You could have been killed, and you wound up having a drinking contest?”
“Of course. Why not? You’d be surprised, being so young and full of modern Service ideals, at just what a colorful outfit the Service used to be in those days. And in any case, you had to drink to stop from going bonkers with boredom. Even with hypertubes and such, it could still take a long time between jumps if weather was bad, or if we had to crawl through normal space on charting duty. Ships weren’t as fast then as they are now.”
I almost choked on the notion that I was full of Service ideals. This was so wrong, I almost laughed. Time to change the subject.
“Mr. Ferguson, sir,” I said.
“James? Why don’t you call me Ron? I mean, we’re not doing bridgetime, we’re off duty…” God, but he had a creepy smile. I felt another twist of revulsion.
“Sir, you said you had a question…?”
He laughed. The brandy, do doubt, had loosened him up. Possibly too much. He said, “Oh yes, my question, my little question. Yes, yes, of course. Mr. Dunne, James…”
I edged further towards his desk.
He went on, “So how the hell did you slip through the Academy unbroken, son? How’d you manage that?”
Staring, shocked, I didn’t know what to say. He was standing there, looking like what must have been his idea of genial, just making small-talk, and taking another numbing sip of his vile brandy. He issued a discreet burp that filled the room with noxious fumes.
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