Reaching for a bit of poise I didn’t know I had, I said, “Unbroken?”
“Yes, unbroken, son. You make all the right yes-sir-no-sir noises, but it’s obvious you resent it all, you’ve got all this attitude and anger. How’d that happen?”
“Mr. Ferguson?”
“For Christ’s sake, son, what do you think the bloody Academy’s for if not breaking the spirit on the anvil of camaraderie?”
I said nothing for a moment, and swallowed. My heartbeat was loud in my ears. “I … thought it was a training school for people entering the Service, sir.”
He jabbed a finger into my shoulder. “That’s right. That’s exactly right. And the first thing that has to go is your spirit. Your sense of importance, of self-worth, ego, all that crap. Once we break you, once you become one of us, then we can make proper officers out of you, officers who’ll voyage out into the dark, knowing they risk losing their bloody minds. Just like poor old Rudyard.” He paused, as if hearing what he just said, “You never heard me say that, boy.”
So I was back to “boy”. The face of the real Ferguson was struggling under this friendly front, like someone trapped under clear ice, pounding against it.
“What about,” I asked, getting angry, “what about individual initiative, instincts, leadership, and those things?”
“When you get promoted, son, you can worry about leadership. If you follow orders, do what you’re told, and trust in the judgment of your superiors, you’ll be fine.”
“But what if the captain’s insane?” I still wasn’t sure what was going on with the captain. I also wasn’t sure I could tell what was sane and what wasn’t. I thought the captain was very disturbed, perhaps in need of help, but beyond that…
He leaned in, pointing his finger at my face. “While he’s in command of this vessel, you’ll obey his orders as though they were the word of God!” he snapped. Now I felt more at home. This was behavior I at least recognized.
“Even if he’s not competent?” By now I felt like I was so screwed, so doomed, it didn’t matter that much what I said to Ferguson. The time for pleasant junior-officer-to-senior-officer chit-chat was over.
“If, and I mean if, he’s not competent, the docs will pull him off-duty. But he’s still on-duty, so what does that tell us, Dunne?”
Ah yes, Ferguson the Obnoxious, I could deal with this. “As a syllogism, sir, it’s okay, but it doesn’t explain how he can remain captain despite having raped a woman while on leave.”
Ferguson’s eyes widened. I saw whites all the way around his pupils; he trembled. He held that brandy glass so tightly I thought it would break. After a moment, the snarling ruddy face subsided again, and he tried hard to reassert the friendly Ferguson mask. He managed a small laugh. “A disposable prostitute, nothing to worry about.”
I took a step towards him, right in his face. “Not a disposable, Ron. She was a real human woman and he beat her up and he raped her and he drank with his mates to celebrate!”
He moved to backhand me. His face was white and full of hate.
I grabbed his arm, blocking him. At the same time, I launched my spyware and ran a macro for accessing Ferguson’s headware. We weren’t in port, so I didn’t have the benefit of a lot of external nodes through which to route the signal. I looped it through ShipMind a couple of times, hoping to anonymize it, and sent it in on a newsfeed carrier.
Ferguson thrummed with hate. He hated that I had blocked him, hated that I knew things I wasn’t meant to know. That was the obvious thing. He had to know everything; he had to be the custodian of information on this ship, and only he would dole it out to those he favored.
He could have attacked me some other way, and I was ready for anything. He’d surprised me a couple of times on other occasions and walloped me hard, but this time I knew there could be trouble. I’d been going over the routines Sorcha had tried to teach me. Best of all, from my perspective, Ferguson, the fool, was drunk. He lowered his arm. For a long, intense time, I listened to his hissing breathing, and watched the bunched muscles in his neck, the bloodless whiteness of his face. I wondered if he was going to spit. As it was, he looked like he didn’t know what to do.
“How,” he rasped, “how do you know all that?”
I grinned, willing myself to relax into a loose, ready state. “He told me. Told me all about it.”
The spyware informed me it had Ferguson’s entry keys. The stupid bastard used his name and rank designation: RFERGUSONSCO6.
It was all I could do not to laugh at his stupidity. Did he think this would be so obvious nobody would ever try it? Maybe he thought nobody would have the balls to try to break into his head. Well, ha-ha on both counts.
The next step was trickier, more risky. I sent the command for the system to sneak into his extreme security area and watch for possible traps. Caroline had told me — and now the online documentation showed me — that the spyware came with enough pre-loaded smarts to watch out for 1790 different headware security traps. Problem was, in the few weeks since then, another hundred or so would have been invented by paranoid and clever hackers and uploaded into the human space infosphere, available to those very concerned about head security. Ferguson struck me as a man who would like to keep up with such developments, even if he was incredibly stupid.
Suddenly I noticed Ferguson was smiling. Not happy-to-see-you-old-chap smiling like he had been trying to pull off when I arrived. This was the ‘I’ve-got-four-aces-you-swine’ kind of smile, and I didn’t like it.
“So, the captain had this little chat with you, just between friends, and he told you all about his little adventure planetside?”
“Does it bother you that he told me, a lowly Level 1 piece of snot like me?”
He moved to sit on his desk. He put the glass down, and poured in a bit more brandy.
“Does it bother me?” he asked, looking around, taking in all his knick-knacks and souvenirs. “Frankly, son, no it doesn’t.” Which had to be a lie.
“I’m glad about that, sir.”
“Because I know something you don’t, Mr. Dunne. Something really juicy!”
The spyware reported finding more than thirty different traps and other nasty surprises so far, and was still working.
“You know my underwear size, sir?”
He put the brandy back down on the desk, nice and slow, smiling in a giddy, evil-little-brother kind of way now. He giggled. It was a horrible sound, that giggle. Suddenly he lunged off the desk and was right in my face. I could see the burst blood vessels in his eyes and the too-wide pupils like pits of doom and smell his god-awful breath. He smiled and said to me in a whisper:
“I know all about you and Admiral Greaves, Jimmy.”
“But,” I said, trying for my former cool on this subject in the face of his maniac leer, “there’s nothing to—”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, feigning sorrow, “I forgot to mention a tiny detail. You were being all difficult and coy, so I suggested to Service Internal Security that they have a quiet word with the admiral. They followed up on my tip and picked her up and they had a lovely chat with her over cucumber sandwiches and chamomile bloody tea.”
I swallowed, trying not to show any emotion.
Ferguson continued: “She gave you up, Jimmy-boy. The crucifying, frigid bitch gave you up. She spoke at great length about her plan to reform the Service, and provided lots of other useful leads for the Security boys to follow, too. Her pointless little crusade is over.”
Eighteen
I took my time responding. “Fascinating, sir.”
He said, “One moment…” And then my headware announced the arrival of new mail: a huge, high-res vid file, labelled GreavesConfession.2.
“Open it, Jimmy. See what she said about you. See what she said about how she used you, had not
hing but contempt for you, hated you for being so effortlessly seducible.”
“Screw you,” I said, my legs weak. Now I was scared.
The spyware was still going about its business inside his head.
My own brain was trying to get to grips with this new data. Admiral Greaves had betrayed me? I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe she’d cave so easily…
I knew that she used me, that I was just a tool, but I thought there was something else there, that we had a connection, an understanding. It was difficult to say. I kept thinking about this idea, that she hated me because I was weak enough to seduce, as if she’d have had more respect for me if I’d resisted and reported her straight to Internal Security myself!
Yet without that weakness, that seducibility, so to speak, how could she recruit naïve young men to her cause?
And how many were there? I wondered, loathing myself.
Now I could see how she’d hated the Service as a whole, the entire system, for spewing out useless, spineless officers like me, for lacking the standards and integrity of former days. In hating me, she hated the system that produced me. It made a sort of sense.
I was having trouble breathing, beginning now to appreciate the degree of almost unimaginable, bottomless trouble I was in. Court-martial. Execution. God… The only person who’d care was Trish. I hated the idea that she might find out about this, the sordidness of it.
Then I thought about Sorcha. What would she think? What would she say?
Ferguson had yet one more bombshell surprise. “Oh, and lover-boy, there’s one other thing. Greaves is dead. Security’s mopping up all her operatives as we speak. When we get back to port, we’re unloading you, too, and good bloody riddance.”
“Dead? She’s dead?”
I wondered, for a desperate moment, if he might be bluffing. Could he lie well enough to pull all this off? I didn’t know enough about him. It didn’t matter. My reactions were giving everything away, I knew that. Maybe, if it had been all a bluff, my reactions would have been enough to convict Caroline. The thought was sickening, that I could kill a person with a horrified gasp, a lethal exhalation.
“She tried to fight the interrogation,” Ferguson said, going back to his desk, looking deeply satisfied. He took a long pull at his brandy straight from the bottle. It looked like he enjoyed it more than anything else in his life. I thought it was pretty pathetic when the most satisfaction you can get in life comes from something like this. It was too easy to imagine him replying with, “Whatever works.”
As I stood there, feeling dead already, there was an announcement from the spyware: it had the access code for Ferguson’s extreme security area, which would give me access to his self-destruct triggers.
I sent it in, thinking, If I’m dead, Ferguson can bloody well come, too!
My legs were giving out. Any minute now I’d be sliding down the door. I could feel myself wanting to weep, and the idea of bawling in front of a bastard like Ferguson felt like a final humiliation. How I hated myself for being so weak I could get drawn into this! And yet, at the same time, I also hated myself for surviving the bastards at the Academy without breaking. If I had just given in, things would have been so much simpler — I wouldn’t be here now. I’d be one of the boys, part of the system, and probably I’d hate the aliens, too, and the threat they represented to everything we had built in human space. I remembered all those guys telling me at the time, stop fighting. Go with the bloody flow, Dunne. Stop making things so difficult for yourself.
But I couldn’t just go along. I kept thinking of Colin. Colin would never have given up and let these bastards break him. He would have fought back, whatever the cost. He would have killed them before letting them break him. The thought of my dead brother’s contempt was too much to bear. I would have to fight back, even if it killed me.
The spyware flashed a warning: System Error — Mesh Support Failure.
I swore under my breath and quickly worked my way through its diagnostic functions, trying to get the spyware back up again. If Ferguson noticed the way I was blinking so conspicuously and realized I was working a system interface, he didn’t show it. Instead, he sat there on his desk, looking empty and drunk.
There was a new announcement from the spyware: Please Reinstall.
Ferguson suddenly looked to one side, alert, frowning. I knew that look. He was getting reports from his counter-intrusion systems. He’d have a trace going, looking for the source.
I looked at the door, but there were no controls on it. Door access here must be controlled either from his desk or through his headware. I was locked in.
This room was so small.
Nauseous fear was piling up inside me, squeezing out all rational thought.
And then everything went to hell: Ferguson snapped his head around, glared at me, suddenly not looking so drunk. “You!” he growled. He got off the desk. “You!” He looked at me with the purest distillate of rage I had ever seen in him.
My bowels went through an instant phase-change straight to water. My bladder felt way too full. “What … are you doing, sir?” I managed, struggling to keep my voice level, even as I wanted to run, for all the good it would do me, stuck on the same ship with him. I found myself wondering if I could kill him with my bare hands.
The spyware was trying to get back up, despite persistent Please Reinstall messages.
He unlatched a drawer in his desk. He said, his voice now soft and quiet, “Do you really want to know, or are you just making conversation, Mr. Dunne?”
Oh shit. What could I do? Glancing around the room for possibilities, I saw nothing that inspired much hope. Maybe I could throw heavy trinkets at him, or try to brain him with one?
What’s he doing with that drawer?
Then I had a thought. I shut down the spyware restart routine and launched full sensorium recording, uploading the feed to ShipMind for broadcast in real-time.
“We can talk about this, sir,” I said, feeling a little better, knowing I was now broadcasting everything to the rest of the ship, including my likely death. There would be too many witnesses to silence.
“Well, Dunne,” he said, not looking mollified, and in fact now looking a little pleased in a sick sort of way, “there’s talk. And there’s talk.” Saying this, he produced a steel dagger from the drawer.
He tossed the blade in the air, spinning it end over end. Light leapt from its narrow chrome blade.
This raised the stakes too high. I backed away, not taking my eyes off the flashing knife. “Mr. Ferguson, Mr. Ferguson, sir, I think — can we talk about…?”
He came around his desk, tossing the blade from one hand to the other. For a man with such heavy hands, he handled that knife well. It was hypnotic, watching it flash back and forth. I hardly noticed his razor eyes and predatory grin.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way, Mr. Dunne. Which would you prefer?”
He was driving me into the corner of the bunk. With his thick arms stretched out, he could reach almost any part of the room in a single step.
There was nowhere to go.
“By the way, son, I’m jamming your upload. Executive Overrides. They’re a great thing to have.”
“I can still record.”
“Hey, so can I,” he said, “and guess who’s going to be believed, regardless?”
Saying that, he feinted with the knife, swooping in across my face. I tried to block.
And then he kicked me hard between my legs; I doubled over in crippling, unbelievable pain, making incoherent noises. I tried to stay upright, but the pain was so bad.
So this is what it feels like when you know you’re done for, I thought.
I tried to move towards the door, to protect my back.
I could feel the ice of Colin’s withering scorn
. “This is all your own stupid fault, runt. You’ve got nobody to blame but yourself.”
Ferguson pushed me onto his bunk. The smell of fresh linen was sharp in my nose.
Oh no oh no oh no…
I had to get my back against the wall. I had to keep my eyes on him. Breathing through my mouth, I could hardly think through the pain in my groin. The dread of what was coming was the worst, knowing that I had not yet even begun to suffer.
I thought I was going to vomit from sheer terror. Weeping, desperate, I tried to get up, to fight back—
“I don’t think so, boy,” he said, and his fist crashed into my nose.
Dark — Pain — Vomiting — Blood — Coughing—
Trying to yell … I was gagging on my own blood.
I wanted to beg for mercy, but I managed to keep silent, holding on to the last fraying thread of dignity I had left, even as I felt him cutting my trousers away.
The fabric ripped. Suddenly, there was cold air on my legs. Gasping, I made some feeble, choking sound; I felt like a drowning kitten.
His hot sticky breath was on my back and on my backside. He grunted with effort, hauling me into place. He was muttering hellish things, as if to conjure demons with bestial urges.
My bladder suddenly lost control.
I heard him laughing. “I’ve been wanting to teach you a lesson for a long time, boy. You’ve been nothing but trouble since day bloody one.”
INTERLUDE
Day 128
I’ve been drifting for months now. Most days there’s nothing to write. I think a lot, and I’m trying to tell the story of what went wrong on that ship, and my own little starring role in it. Not sure now why I’m recording it, either. Posterity seems like a joke. I already know this boat is heading away from human space, tumbling through cold vacuum. The nearest star is nine light-years, so I figure this is my deathbed statement, or testament. Eventually I’ll pass near enough to a star or hunk of dark matter or some damn thing that’ll swerve the boat around, and one day I’ll start a spiral of death into a star. Which is probably the hell I deserve.
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