Empty Space

by Alan Black

  The sergeant looked through the party’s video at York. “You been drinking and doing drugs, Cadet Sixteen?”

  “Sir, no,” York replied. “You have my express permission to test me.”

  The fat man laughed. “We don’t need your permission. We have enough evidence to force a test.”

  York nodded and stood silently while the sergeant slid an evidence wand along a patch of bare skin. York was tempted to respond, but decided he should keep his mouth shut. The policewoman was correct. He’d been set up and he was screwed. Anything he said would only dig the hole deeper.

  The sergeant nodded. “Cadet, your tests look clean except your electrolytes are a little low. Take some supplements when you work out next time.” The older man sighed again. “Okay people, let’s get this wrapped up and off the streets. We have more to do than look for some random partiers, unless Cadet Sixteen would like to supply us with the names of his co-conspirators?”

  York kept his mouth closed.

  “Okay, let’s get this investigation off the street. Cadet Sixteen, you are under arrest for breaking and entering. Further charges may be added as the investigation progresses. Do you wish to comply with the order of arrest or do you wish to resist?”

  TWO

  York didn’t even shake his head in response. He continued to stare at the video of the party until the Sergeant shut it off. He knew every cadet in it. He knew the rich kids in his cadet class had a strange sense of humor, or rather, their sense of humor was strange to him. However, this didn’t feel funny to him at all. Being stopped and arrested wasn’t a joke. He knew they’d all been complicit in setting him up for this arrest.

  Telling the police the identity of every person in the video would be easy, yet could he prove it? Part of the Republic’s military code of conduct as a whole was to watch each other’s back. No matter what the situation or your feelings about a military member they were your family. You protected family. It didn’t matter if Balderano, Telluride and their friends violated the code. York wouldn’t break his oath, if he could help it. The military code of conduct was secondary only to his personal code. If possible, he would have to find a way to apply the military code within the scope of his personal one. If not, his sense of justice would win out.

  Honor, integrity, loyalty, justice, and compassion weren’t just fancy words to York. He kept his mouth clamped shut. He let the two police behind him grab his arms and guide him into a whisper quiet police cruiser.

  The policewoman leaned in as he slid onto the bench seat in the back. She said quietly into his ear, “Don’t keep your mouth shut, Sixteen. It won’t help you a tiny bit to protect whoever was at your party. They burned you and won’t be one iota grateful for you keeping your mouth shut.”

  York stared straight ahead. He was keeping quiet for his own sense of right and wrong. Telluride and Balderano’s gratitude meant less to him than what he generated when he blew his nose. As a child, he’d been taught at the orphanage that ‘you get along by going along’. Brother Calvin had stressed that point along with the value of ‘keeping your mouth shut’. York knew trying to get along by going along was stupid. He would get along or fail by the code he’d developed and the one he’d accepted at the Yards. Long ago he’d learned to dovetail them together quite well.

  York wanted vengeance against each partier. He cleared the thought of revenge from his mind as a waste of effort. He knew in the long run, he couldn’t touch them in any meaningful way without more damage to his own life. The dog pack would eventually earn their rewards for failure to live up to the code.

  His nose wrinkled involuntarily as a particularly strong odor of vomit oozed up from the cruiser’s floor. The floor looked wet, as if recently hosed down. Someone, or a group of someones, had emptied their stomachs in the confines of the small space. He tried to keep his face passive. Not reacting to the stench was difficult with the odor wafting around him. He shook his head to clear the smells as a quick odor of rotten eggs assaulted his nose followed by a rancid smell reminiscent of an overworked sewage system. He laughed aloud when he realized the smells were pumped deliberately into the cruiser for the benefit of the occupants. He wondered if the smells were a new police technique employed to break down the defenses of any miscreant jammed into the backseat.

  Was the policewoman a real budger like him or were they playing the old good-cop bad-cop routine on him? He laughed again. It wouldn’t matter who he said was at the party. The average policeman couldn’t touch Blade Balderano or Balderano’s friends without the political fallout damaging his career. The credits finding their way into their bank accounts would offset their shame at looking the other way or fudging a bit of evidence.

  The police hadn’t placed him in restraints. He was still determined not to resist in any way. This was a new experience for him and he decided he might as well make the most of it. After all, they could kill him, but they couldn’t eat him.

  York wiggled in the seat, becoming more comfortable. Today was his birthday and he was graduating from the Yards. He hadn’t violated any academy rules, ordnances or directives. He’d been given a legitimate pass off academy grounds. Even if he had been drinking, it was off campus. Gambling on academy grounds was against Yards regulations. These were civilian charges and wouldn’t affect his military career even if the police did follow through on their threat of charging him with breaking and entering.

  He checked his dataport. By law, they couldn’t hold him long enough to delay his attendance at graduation unless they declared him a danger to himself or others. A miscreant couldn’t hide from the police on New Hope. There might be a few spots in Independence City or on the planet as a whole that weren’t under surveillance, but a normal human couldn’t survive in those spots for long without revealing their presence. So, why hold a man in custody if you could find him and pick him up any time you wanted to?

  This little detour was just one more minor challenge in his life on his way to … to … to where? For so many years, York’s singular goal was to remain at the Yards. Earlier in his life, his goals were to get out of and avoid going back to the orphanage, the military prep school, and the dismal nothing existence following the poor wretches who graduated from those dreadful institutions. The last few years, his goal morphed into graduating, not just getting by. That goal developed into a desire to rise so high the Yards couldn’t knock him down and out. He’d achieved a real height. He’d earned the rank of cadet-colonel. They couldn’t take the achievement away from him.

  Now what? Leaving the Yards meant an automatic enrollment in the Republic’s military. Both army and space navy commands drew their leading officers from the Yards graduates. He hadn’t thought more about his impending graduation aside from giving him the right to choose an exciting job such as fighter pilot. The choice was more important to him than the job. Then what? Where was he going? Even if he’d flunked out of the Yards as had many of his fellow charity cases had he would’ve been automatically enrolled as a low ranking enlisted soldier or spaceman. Becoming an enlisted spacer was no more than the orphanage operators said he could achieve. So many orphans and charity cases were dumped into the military it would feel like old home week to go there. Still, York wanted more. He didn’t know what yet, just … well, more.

  Moments later he was ushered into the police station. He passed through the identification scanner, feeding his arrest information into police records. Those central database records contained data covering every part of York’s life. They held his fingerprints, DNA, the orphanage picture taken when he was six, the medical information about the high temperature from the common cold he had at eight and the grade from his last physics exam. The database contained all the information from his life: bland, minor and major. All except the first few hours between his birth and being found on the front porch of the orphanage. That remained a mystery to the database and to York.

  He knew the law concerning abandoned children. How could he not! Turning an unwanted chil
d over to the social systems wasn’t illegal. Many poor had to turn over children or run the risk of starving their other children. Birth control would have helped many families except the extremely conservative Republic government deemed such things immoral. The database maintained information on the parents and the lineage of all children. It gave the child a name and a family history, no matter how unattractive the name and history might be. To drop a child off and run away wasn’t acceptable to the law or to decent society.

  The law required a DNA scan to match all children abandoned anonymously, negating any anonymity. In a civilization where every person had DNA on file, there wasn’t any DNA match on file for York. The official explanation was a freighter or itinerant spacer become pregnant, dropped a baby off, and then left the planet. The explanation didn’t make any attempt to explain how such an event could occur when every spacer was scanned for DNA and other identifiers before being allowed to exit their spacecraft, even for an afternoon of rest and recreation.

  Society winked at how many pregnant women on freighters gave birth and abandoned those children on New Hope. York was the twenty-fourth baby found at the orphanage during the sixteenth year of the twenty-sixth century, old Earth style calendar. Being twenty-fourth allowed the unimaginative orphanage administrator to name him using the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet, choosing the name of an old Earth city. The year provided him his last name.

  York liked his name. He was grateful he hadn’t been found fifteenth and been named Naccadocious after some town in Texas. He knew Naccadocious Sixteen didn’t like the name so much since she’d decided long ago to go by the name Candi Holes for her job as a dancer at a men’s club near the spaceport.

  York had the legal right to change his name at any time after turning twelve and before he turned twenty-one. However, the name suited him. The name was a reminder of where he came from and how far he’d yet to go. All he needed was a destination. The fire in his belly, fuelled each time his name was shouted as an insult, would get him to his goal. Whatever the reason, this was his twenty-first birthday. His given name, York August Sixteen was his for good.

  York expected to be ushered into an interrogation room. He expected it to be a small sterile room with a non-descript table and a couple of plain metal chairs. He was surprised at being led into a well-appointed room with lush carpet, decent artwork on the clean wallpapered walls, a sofa, comfortable chairs, and a nice coffee table.

  He eased himself onto an overstuffed chair. The cushions seemed to sigh and settle around him. The chair was certainly a different sitting experience than the hard task chair in his dorm room. Comfortable or not, he sat at attention. Even if he’d given it a second thought, he wasn’t sure he knew how to sit any other way after all of these years.

  He stared at a picture on the wall. The odd oil painting was of men sitting on some four-legged beast chasing and trying to catch a huge horned beast with just a looped rope. He wondered what kind of use the men would have for the horned beast. Riding the other animal looked fun, still the horned beast definitely didn’t want to be roped and had an angry look it its eyes. He wondered what planet the painting depicted. It definitely wasn’t New Hope. New Hope was more water than the wide-open lands depicted in the painting. Any open land on this planet was filled with buildings and people. There were certainly no mountains as high as the painting showed. He decided it must be just a place in the imagination of the painter.

  The door flew open. York snapped to his feet, bracing at attention. He’d fully expected to speak to a policeman, if not the old sergeant, then a detective or investigator. He hadn’t expected to see the Yard’s commandant.

  The commandant ignored the open door, leaving it ajar. She also ignored York, leaving him standing at rigid attention. She didn’t look at anything in the room, except the painting York had been staring at. She snorted in amusement and slapped a button on the wall. A desk and office chair dropped into place.

  The commandant was dressed in a formal uniform, the only uniform York had never seen her wear. She’d never had one miniscule iota of her uniform undone, one speck of dust anywhere, or one stray hair out of place. She looked, moved, and acted like a living recruiting poster. She was resplendent even with glaring details missing from her uniform. The most obvious was her nametag, she didn’t wear one. No one knew her name, not the instructors, not the staff, and certainly not the cadets. She was the commandant, not a person. Her name was irrelevant. Her position as leader and educator of future officers was important.

  The commandant’s uniform had no rank, only the special commandant’s insignia. There were no medals, ribbons, or commendation tabs, such as so proudly displayed on most senior officer’s dress uniforms. She wasn’t an individual. She was the embodiment of the military life, a life of service beyond self. She was the commandant at the Yards when he first arrived, and she scared the bejabbers out of York every day. She was the only human to engender fear in him since Brother Calvin abused the emotion out of him. Her random inspections could drive full-grown cadets into fits of tears, sending more than one trainee scampering back to civilian life. No man, woman or child was safe against her white gloved wrath. York tried to stay out of her pinpoint focus, hoping that each time her attention would be granted to another unlucky cadet. Now he was the unlucky one. It felt like he was standing naked before God Almighty.

  She slid onto the chair behind the desk, seeming to hover a fraction of an inch above the hard backed folding chair. Continuing to ignore York, she flashed through screen after screen of information on her dataport. Saying nothing, she obviously required no response from York or any police officer present.

  York stood at attention despite the cold trail of sweat trickling down his back. He could only see the commandant peripherally, his eyes were locked onto the wall before him. He stared unblinkingly at the loop of rope barely missing the beast’s horns in the painting.

  The commandant tapped the desk in front of her. “Empty your pockets, Cadet-Colonel Sixteen.”

  York’s heels clicked together and slammed into the carpet as he marched to the desk. He emptied his pockets as commanded and returned to attention. The credits in his pocket were more cash than he’d ever had at one time. The small amount was twice what he paid for his new civilian clothes. That pittance had taken him almost his entire cadet-colonel year to save from the pitiful stipend granted to him by the government mandated budget line item.

  His eyes never wavered from a point on the wall at exactly eye level as if following a laser drawn line. His eyes now rested in a blank spot on the opposite wall. He realized he’d never seen the commandant’s face, except through his peripheral vision.

  He heard the coins clinking on the table as the commandant counted and stacked the credits. She grunted and quickly flashed through a few informational screens. She entered a few bits of data onto a screen. York wanted to explain. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t speak to the police, but this was the commandant. He would readily explain anything and everything to the commandant. The police wanted him to talk, it appeared the commandant didn’t. She would order him to speak if she wanted him to and he would answer any and every question she asked without hesitation. He would admit he didn’t always wash his hands after going to the restroom. He would admit that if no one was around he wouldn’t cover his mouth when he coughed. He would admit he sometimes peed in the shower. He would identify everyone in the party video. All she had to do was ask. She didn’t ask. She left him standing at attention. She all but ignored him.

  Finally, she said, “You have more money in your pockets than I can account for in a review of your banking statements. That, plus the surveillance video of your party showing you playing cards, is proof positive of gambling on academy grounds. It doesn’t matter how, or even if, you knew that particular building was owned by the academy for temporary housing of visiting dignitaries and how you knew it would be empty for your soiree. A review of past surveillance recordings show erasures f
or a number of times matching exactly your times off academy grounds. The evidence points inescapably to additional parties just like this one.”

  York’s heart sank. He’d thought the house was Balderano’s off campus home. Many of the rich cadets owned places to go when released from study or duties. Balderano’s dog pack each had apartments or lofts for relaxing away from the confines of the Yards. York had only his small room on the grounds, a luxury given to final year cadets.

  He almost snorted at the thought of Balderano calling his clique the dog pack. Calling his group of friends the dog pack was an obvious attempt to play off the name of his father’s political party, an ultra conservative group calling themselves Dog Soldiers, politicians who’d drawn platform lines in the proverbial sand and would go no farther. Known for neither backing up nor moving forward, they stubbornly stuck to one issue’s side, refusing to relent or even discuss any opposing view. Many of Balderano Junior’s clique were the offspring of Balderano Senior’s caucus.

  She sighed and seemed to look at him for the first time. She shook her head.

  York caught the slight movement at the bottom of his peripheral vision.

  “It is doubtful you developed your sense of fashion by spending a lot of money on clothes, but it would take serious deprivation in your spending habits to even afford that hideous costume. However, there are many places to spend money other than on clothes.”

  She pulled a medical wand from a deep pocket. Stretching across the table, she slid it across the back of York’s hand. She stared at the readout and compared it to the information on the dataport.

  “Amazing,” the commandant said. “You’re a medical marvel. Police records indicate you had a blood alcohol content of 2.4 less than an hour ago, yet my device shows you to be more sober than I am. Plus, I cannot find any evidence of the drug MDMA in your system as shown in their reports. Still, even I can’t deny your DNA was found on a glass containing alcohol and illegal drugs. Drinking on academy property is as serious a violation as gambling.”