Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  “No, Neela. This ship was once the pride and joy of the Imperial spy service, and so far it’s escaped the notice of the Unity internal security. However, what do you think would happen if we took military contracts and kept showing up earlier than we ought for every delivery. It’s just inviting scrutiny. We’ve always had the policy that we don’t do anything with the ship to attract attention. Besides, the turnaround on the military contracts is so tight that we wouldn’t be able to do anything charitable, and we’re all here to help, right?” Soren made eye contact with Neela and refused to look away.

  Neela held her gaze for a moment. Then her cheeks turned red, and she looked down at her lap. Under her breath, she mumbled quietly, “A lot of good all that will do us if we can’t keep flying.”

  “It’s been eight years since the end of the war. We’ve kept on this long. We’ll find a different way.”

  Freddi spoke up. “You and Neela may have kept the Clarion in the void for eight years, Captain, but I’m not sure what good we’re actually doing. We drop a load of food off here and a few medical supplies there, but none of it really does any good long term. The people just become dependent on us and the other captains who go out of their way to help out.” The engineer absently twirled the datapad in her hand as she spoke. “I’m an engineer. If there’s one thing I understand, it’s systems, and I’m just not convinced that what we’re doing is fixing our very broken system. In fact, I tend to think that charity just makes it worse. It may make us feel better, but are we really helping the people?”

  This piqued Katy’s interest, and she sat forward a little bit. She’d been involved in a few meetings in the Ghost Fleet, and it had been exceedingly rare to hear anyone give this kind of straight-up criticism to a superior officer. She wanted to speak up but wasn’t sure if she should.

  She was surprised that Soren didn’t bite Freddi’s head off. However, she did sound a little irritated. She held her hands up and shrugged. “They’re alive, Freddi. That has to count for something.”

  “I understand that, Captain. I just think that by making them dependent on us, we’re making it harder on them to stay alive in the future, not to mention their children, who will know nothing but a life of dependence. Is that really helping? Or maybe there’s a better question. Is it sustainable, Captain? With the Unity slowly giving up the pretense that a re-education camp was anything more than a way to starve people, are we do-gooders really going to be able to keep up? If we keep doing this, aren’t we just prolonging the inevitable?”

  Soren frowned but nodded her head. “That I agree with. What we’ve done in the past isn’t sustainable going forward. It might have been once, maybe five years ago or more, but now there are just too many people in need to be able to help even a few of them.”

  Freddi’s comment struck a chord in Katy. It actually made clear something that had bothered her during her earlier conversation with Soren. Her comment came out of her mouth before she thought it through. “Have you asked them what they want you to do for them?”

  Soren shook her head and exhaled noisily, irritation returning to her voice. “Not really. I’ve just been trying to keep us flying and away from the authorities. Most of us on this boat would have been sent to re-ed long ago if they knew about our past. It’s kinda hard when you’re on the run to sit down and talk.” For a moment she rested, then took a long breath. When she spoke again, she did so with less irritation. “I know what you’re getting at, though. Under different circumstances, I would say that the stuff we do is charity of the worst sort. It’s top-down and disabling, but remember they are starving. They need food before they can even think about creating some kind of life in this mangled universe. The truth is, most often we find out about an opportunity to do a food drop from some other organization that will benefit from the drop. In the case of the last one, it was the local mining department, which needs the cheap labor the Omitted provide. So most often, there really isn’t much opportunity to ask them, and neither Neela or I have time to do so.”

  Katy sat forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her hands on her chin. She looked down at the floor and spoke quietly. “I have time.”

  “Before you do anything, watch me.” Soren’s salt-and-pepper curls stood up off her head as if they were charged with static. In the zero G of the spine, Katy’s straight coffee-colored hair did the same.

  Soren shut her eyes. “If you ever get lost, just return to your breath. The goal for this meditation is simply to focus your mind on your breathing.”

  Bringing her thick legs up near her middle, she tucked them one on top of the other as if she were sitting cross-legged, all the while allowing her eyes to remain closed. She made a hollow hissing noise with her nose as she intentionally took large, slow breaths and released them from her nostrils.

  Katy almost rolled her eyes. It all felt so stupid. Breathing wasn’t going to fix her. Her problems were much bigger.

  Without opening her eyes, Soren reached out and touched the wall nearby. Only when she had stopped her motion did she slowly release her legs and open her eyes. “Now it’s your turn.”

  Katy quickly imitated what she had seen Soren doing. Closing her eyes, she tried to breathe as she had heard Soren do. None of it seemed that hard. After a minute, she opened her eyes and shrugged. Trying not to sound dismissive, she said, “That’s not very hard.”

  Soren smiled. “What were you thinking about while you were breathing? Can you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing really, I guess.” Katy decided she didn’t really want to tell Soren that she was thinking about how stupid this whole exercise appeared to be to her.

  Soren gave a short chuckle. “Katy, the mind never stops. It’s always thinking. The sitting, the breathing, none of that is really what this exercise is about. All of that is just to help you decide where to put your mind. This exercise is really about your thoughts. It’s about focusing on one thing—a simple thing—your breath. We learn this so that you are able to choose your focus later when you need to, when it’s difficult not to panic.”

  “All the time? I’m supposed to think about my breath all the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Today, we’ll try for ten minutes. In the future, we’ll do thirty.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  Soren grinned. “Now you understand the challenge.”

  Katy stood in front of Soren’s desk in a military at-ease position. Freddi stood with her hand resting on the I-beam running just above her head. Soren sat at her desk reading the proposal, which the two of them had presented to her on a datapad. Still reading, she gestured to the two chairs in front of her. “Have a seat.”

  Katy settled easily into the left chair while Freddi cautiously folded her long frame into the right, careful to avoid knocking over Soren’s black-leafed houseplants sitting tucked under the small porthole. The porthole was the only one not located in a public area of the vessel.

  The three of them sat in silence while Soren digested the information. Soren frowned and shook her head.

  After a moment more, she put the datapad down and focused her attention on Freddi first. “This isn’t what I expected. You’re talking about upending our whole business model on this ship.”

  Freddi tipped her head to one side. “Only to put us on a better footing in the long term.”

  Soren’s voice bordered on icy. “If we aren’t all executed first. You want us to get involved with trying to start this rebellion that everyone is waiting for.”

  Freddi leaned forward. “I do. I’d rather go down swinging than live safely while we watch the galaxy burn around us. Top-down regimes that don’t take care of their people are doomed from the start. When people are forced to bend for any length of time, they rebel. Think back a thousand years. Communism fell for this exact reason. Within a few years, capitalism succumbed to oligarchy, and the West fell soon thereafter. It’s all one piece. Then there was the end
of the Transnational Ecosystem Protectorate—that fell, too. The common denominator is too much power in too few hands, and after a season, it falls apart. That’s exactly what is happening all around us. This whole bullshit about a coming alien armada is designed to create a purpose for a corporation that no longer has any meaning. It’s only succeeded this long because the House of Athena provided an external enemy. It’s already collapsing around CEO Timothy Randal’s ears. I just want to give it a nice little push.”

  Soren smirked. “You read too many books, Freddi.”

  Freddi returned the smirk and shrugged. “It gets boring when you’re spending six hours flushing a coolant system.”

  Soren sighed. “So you think this is the way to bring down the Unity?”

  “I’m convinced it’s as good a plan as any and far better than most. You can’t beat the Unity militarily, so you have to take it down from the inside.”

  Katy spoke up. “Captain, it gives choices back to the people, and the brilliance of it is that the people who get those choices are those who the Unity has dismissed as useless in the first place—the Omitted. At least, that’s where we start, but what we’re proposing is really nothing but an extension of the black market. I could see us also working with registered citizens to do these kinds of projects. People want to have a say in what happens to their lives. I mean, even citizens are suffering in the Unity. Look at what happened on Mt. Fuji. If the rumors we heard from the Titan are true, Fuji’s engineer got pushed past his breaking point. He snapped, and thousands of people died.”

  Soren leaned back in her chair, placing her hands behind her head, looking up at the ceiling. She gestured with her right hand as she spoke. “See, that’s exactly my concern, Katy. The Unity has tolerated, even tacitly supported, the black market in its midst as long as it does two things. First, it greases the bureaucracy—in other words, administrators and supervisors have an unofficial way to get what they need to do their jobs—and second, it has tolerated a black market that produces and distributes low-end consumer goods that improve the basic quality of life for the average citizen.”

  Freddi interjected. “Bread and circuses—it’s been that way for thousands of years. Bread to keep the system moving. Circuses to keep the peace.”

  Soren continued. “Exactly! However, our plan directly breaks those tacit rules, particularly when we work with the Omitted. The Unity has always, always, resisted anything that would help the people become independent of mother Unity. The kinds of community development projects you want us to take on would do just that—help people live outside of Unity control. This puts us and anyone we help in the crosshairs.”

  Freddi leaned forward, hands resting on her knees. Her voice kicked up half an octave. “That’s why we have to be careful what goods we take. The kinds of industrial goods we’re talking about—solar farms, water-reclamation equipment, soil-creation systems—those are still the kinds of items that the bureaucracy loves to produce. It’s something that a senior-level administrator can take to the CEO and say, ‘Look what we’re doing for the people,’ but there is no effort to actually distribute these projects. I could take you to any warehouse station in any system, and I guarantee you that I could find you a 40,000-gallon-an-hour fusion-powered water-reclamation plant sitting, taking up space, with nowhere to go. All because ten years ago some asshat trying to get a promotion to the board decided that producing water-reclamation plants would be her ticket, and you know what? It worked.

  “Now, warehouse administrators practically beg to get rid of these things. I could give you example after example of heavy industrial items just like this that molder in warehouses because there has been no distribution scheme for the product. In fact, in recent years, a few managers have ended up jettisoning whole plants into space, just to make room for the next set of weapons components or hull plating coming out of the new factories.

  “But now there are the growing number of Omitted, and they need these things to live. By taking them off warehouse managers’ hands, we’d be doing them a favor. They’d owe us big time, and by giving them to the Omitted, they get a chance to live. Who’s going to turn us in?”

  Soren frowned, and she looked at Freddi a little sideways. “Down the road? Human Resources or some other security apparatus that catches a whiff of this.”

  “Maybe, but they’re human, too. We’ll pay the bribes when we have to.”

  “Where are we going to get the money for that?”

  “You’ve seen the profit margin proposed on the first mission.” Soren started to object, but Freddi charged forward. “There’s a lot of margin in that number, too. We can do well enough if they produce only ten percent of what we estimated.”

  “I hope you’re right about the bribes, Freddi. We might need all that money to keep this quiet.”

  Freddi shrugged. “We’re not here to get rich. We pay what’s necessary. It’s how the system has gotten along in the Unity for over three hundred years.”

  “Yes, well, remember, the system also executes people on a regular basis to make sure that no one gets out of line.”

  Katy thought for a minute before speaking, trying to organize the jumble in her head. “I guess …” She paused and drew in a breath. Her voice became firm. “I’ve decided that I don’t care. This whole stupid mess leaves everyone trading dignity and self-respect for the sake of keeping the peace with a dictatorial, impersonal bureaucracy. I don’t think that I can make that trade any longer, and I guess I don’t care if I create a rebellion that works out well or not. Better to die with my self-respect than to die having accepted a slow descent into uselessness and submission. I partly left the Ghost Fleet because it was stagnant with no way forward. They didn’t have the firepower to take on the enemy, and they wouldn’t do anything but hide. It was intolerable. I don’t want that to happen here.”

  Soren ran a hand through her curls. “It’s a real danger. It’s just so difficult to know when to take the risk. Rebellion without purpose can be just as useless as impotent submission, but I guess this isn’t really about that, is it?” Her voice trailed off while a frown crossed her face, and her eyes became unfocused.

  A second or two later, she seemed to return. Her voice sounded heavier. “But maybe in the end you’re right. If we don’t act now, I’m not sure if we’ll act at all. When the Empire fell, I thought of this ship as an oasis of talent in a desert of stifling bureaucracy, a place where people can take risks and fail, a place where talent is exposed and honed. The honest truth is I wasn’t expecting to say yes to this proposal. I expected to say no, but even as I read it, I think my heart knew it was the right thing to do. If I say no to this, I will be putting the whole mission for this ship at risk. Besides, if we can make it work”—here she held up her hands as if to hold back the enthusiasm of the two women across from her—“and that is a huge if—but if we can make it work, then we have the potential to put this boat on a far better financial footing and do some good at the same time.”

  Although Katy noted Soren’s use of the words maybe and if, Soren seemed to relax.

  The older woman grinned and turned to Katy. “Have you ever told Freddi what you recommended to Jonas Athena just after they jumped out of Pontus at the end of the war?”

  Katy never liked talking about herself. Soren was probably the only person in the world that she confided in. Having something she had told her brought back embarrassed her. She blushed. “No.”

  Soren waved a hand at her to encourage her. “Well, humor me. I want to hear it again.”

  Unsure, Katy raised an eyebrow. “All right. I told him that he needed to become Robin Hood.”

  Freddi shrugged. “Who?”

  Soren pounced. “Ha! So Katy knows some history that you don’t, Freddi.”

  Katy chuckled, and Freddi rolled her eyes.

  Katy continued. “Well, Robin Hood isn’t exactly history. It’s an old myth from about two thousand years ago—during the Middle Ages. Supposedly, there was a thief
who lived in the forests of England and robbed the rich to feed the poor. I thought that would be the best strategy for the Ghost Fleet. We try to rob the rich and give it to the marginal people like the Omitted.”

  “Did Prince Athena follow through?”

  “Sort of. They tried to do a few raids at the beginning, right after the war, but a fleet that size isn’t exactly nimble, and to tell the truth, I don’t think the people were ready. The full disaster of Unity rule hadn’t come on them yet. They were still willing to wait and see before they rocked the boat. Overall, it didn’t work, and after they lost a carrier and a couple of capital ships during one raid on a commercial convoy, they gave up.”

  Soren tented her hands and tapped her fingertips, laughing a little. “And now we want to do the same thing.”

  Soren stopped for a moment and looked at Katy. “So there’s only one question I have left. Why Salvador, Katy? Why go back there?”

  Katy had anticipated that Soren might ask this question. “First, it’s profitable. In three months, when we pick up our first container, that alone will be a complete game changer for the Clarion.” Katy met Soren’s scrutiny with an intense gaze of her own. “And … I have unfinished business there.”

  “Unfinished business?”

  “I promised the …” Katy suddenly choked up. “I told the man who was killed that I would come back with medicine for his daughter.”

  Soren’s voice was stern. “Katy, you don’t owe him anything. You never did.”

  “I know. I just keep thinking about those kids, and that’s why I want to go back, and this is the perfect chance to do it. I can set up a clinic and get some of the locals trained in how to handle the salt poisoning in their kids. It’s not very technical, but it will take a bit. The three months it will take to get the salt-reclamation project up and running will be just the perfect amount of time to do the job.”