Fool's War

by Sarah Zettel

  The look Schyler gave her was thoughtful. His brown eyes seemed to deepen. “You live the life, don’t you?”

  Yerusha’s hands gripped her shins. “I try to,” she answered softly. “I believe it. We’re free out here in the environments that we build and we maintain. We pay a heavy price when we’re confined to a planet. We’ve got to watch every move we make and worry about all the other life that we might upset by blundering around down there. We have to die to make way for other life. We pay for the freedom of space too; we have to help each other out no matter what. We have to take charge of what we do and never stop learning. We have to constantly build on our achievements because if we slow down, our worlds, our freedom will fall apart. But we can get reckless and we can get stupid and we can do dangerous things and not have to worry about anything but ourselves, and we can live as long as we can manage it.”

  Schyler nodded. The lines in his square face had deepened into grooves and Yerusha found herself wondering what had put them all there. The backs of his hands and the stance of his body belonged to a much younger man than that face did.

  “Well, I’ve got a friend on the justice council at Free Home Titania.” He clapped both hands on his knees and stood up. “If you want me to, I’ll submit a detailed report of the whole thing. The word of a starbird’s got to count for more than the word of a burn-brained groundhugger.” He gave her a ghost of a smile and turned away.

  Yerusha stared after him. “Hey, Watch?”

  He turned his head so she could see a one-quarter profile of him. His eyebrow arched.

  “How’d you get out here?” She couldn’t believe she was asking. This was rude. This was extremely rude. Your fellow crewmember’s past was their own. Your only concern should be their present. But she found that she wanted to know the answer more than she wanted to be polite.

  He sighed deeply and turned all the way around. “You ever hear of the Liberty colonies?”

  Yerusha pulled back a little. “Yeah, I’ve heard of them.”

  Schyler’s smile was tight. His hands had thrust themselves back into his pockets. “They’re as bad as you’ve heard.”

  Liberty colonies were based on an old philosophy that said large, centralized governments, controls on trade, and questioning what a person did do within the bounds of their personal property were all detrimental to humanity’s freedom. A full dozen colonies had been settled with that philosophy of “true” liberty.

  Yerusha’s first outside contract had been under a pilot who’d hauled freight out of a Liberty colony. He never said what kind of freight, but he had plenty to say about the colony.

  “Picture a whole world made up of tiny armies,” he’d said. “Blood feuds over who did what to who’s grandmother, or who’s ancestor might’ve been a Khurd or a Muslim, or who shuffled who out of the last contract. Nobody’s stopped from doing whatever they want, until their neighbors gang up on them and put an end to it permanently. Those neighbors have to make sure they’ve got to take out the whole family in the bargain though, or they’ve just started another feud. People can trade in anything they want, sure, and some of them are rich as all the heavens, and they aren’t constrained by most of the social niceties that the rest of us have to deal with, but free?” He’d just shuddered and shook his head.

  Schyler met her eyes. “My folks died when I was three. I never knew why. When I was twenty, I watched three brothers and two sisters die from taking bio-exotics from one port to another. Hal and Andie went to hijackers. Mark and Shelly decided to lift some of the cargo for themselves and it got into their bloodstreams, which was when we found out we were weapons running. Ray got it when the family went after the guys who had us hauling weapons without telling us.” He wasn’t even blinking. Yerusha did not want to have to guess how tightly he was reigning his emotions in. “I wasn’t very good at killing, or at covering my own back. I knew if I stayed there I’d be dead before I hit twenty-five.” He shrugged. “So, I left.”

  Yerusha opened her mouth to say, “And nobody tried to stop you?” But she remembered the place they were talking about and stopped herself.

  “A freighter’s engineer took pity on me and then a tanker pilot did the same. They got me as far as Kilimanjaro Station. I was so lost.” He gave a small laugh. “I wasn’t even sure how to take a friendly suggestion, never mind how to follow a regulation. I didn’t even know how to buy something that had a fixed price.” His right had came out his pocket and he jerked his thumb towards the hatch. “Al Shei was apprenticing on the station. She found me trying to argue price with an auto-server.” His smile spread, becoming reminiscent. “She helped me out, gave me etiquette lessons, got me a job, after she convinced me that she didn’t have fangs under her hijab, that is.” Yerusha raised her eyebrows. Schyler mimicked the gesture. “All Muslims have fangs and are crazy terrorists, didn’t you know that? That’s one of the reasons the Liberty colonies have to exist, to keep Us Good Folks safe from Them.”

  Yerusha chuckled. “I heard the exact same thing from an African Purist once.”

  “I heard it from an Aryan.” His hand delved back into his pocket. “Anyway, when Al Shei offered me watch on board the Pasadena, I didn’t even think about saying no. I never got really good at…large groups. Too many rules, shifting all the time. A crew of sixteen and a place I knew like the back of my hand was just about what I could handle. As long as I’m here, I know who I am, who she is, and…” he paused. “Well, now I know who you are.” Schyler cycled the hatch open and left her sitting there.

  Now that there was no one left to see, Yerusha wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees. You may know who I am, Watch, she thought. But I’m not so sure some days.

  She had thought he was going to ask about her exile. It would have been natural. After all, he had just offered up his life’s story. Even while he was talking, Yerusha had found herself replaying that whole fractured day in her head.

  Maybe he didn’t ask because he was from a Liberty colony. That was something else her freighter-boss had said; “You’re free to do anything you want, except ask another idiot what they’re doing.”

  “Just as well,” she whispered to the empty room. “I didn’t want to tell him.”

  She most definitely did not want to tell him how Kim and Thatcher had come to the duty station she shared with Holden and told her there was a conspiracy meeting going down with a group that wanted to create trouble for Port Oberon. She did not want to say how she’d heard these two were organizers for the quiet dole but had refused to believe it because they were candidates for the Senior Guard, just like she was. She had seen the fear in Holden’s eyes and had heard the tension in his voice as he all but begged her to stay at her post. She decided to ignore all that. She let Thatcher cover for her, and let Kim take her down to what proved to be an empty cargo hold and explain quietly that there were only so many openings for Senior, and it was position with so many possibilities for someone who knew how to really use it, that it couldn’t go to somebody like Yerusha. Not that this was just about her, of course. Holden had refused several very polite offers for promotion in the ranks of those who ran the dole, and they couldn’t have that either.

  There was, of course, no reason for Yerusha to remain in such an uncomfortable position. There was plenty she could do to get out of it. She had a lot of ingenuity, and great prospects. All she had to do was accept a little extra credit on the side, for a few simple tasks.

  Yerusha landed a punch on his throat, and ran back to her post. The alarms were blaring. Holden was screaming, and the pressure hatch swung shut. The airlock blew out and they never found the body.

  Yerusha tried to tell them at trial. But, the cameras had been damaged in the blow out, and it was Kim and Thatcher’s words against her, and they had back-up alibis and she didn’t. She had deserted her post knowingly. She had failed to report in to her superiors. She had failed to assist in efforts to squash the quiet dole. A Freer had died because o
f her negligence. This was true. This was fact. Holden was dead when he didn’t have to be and it was her fault. She was phenomenally lucky the judges thought something unproven was going on, or her exile would have been permanent.

  No, I don’t want to tell Schyler about all that. Nobody needs to know about that.

  Yerusha picked herself up off the treadmill and pulled the towel away from the velcro. She could hear the faint buzz of Javerri’s mystery still playing itself out in the booth. She’d never had much use for interactives, but Javerri seemed to like them a lot. Maybe she could recommend a good one. Maybe it would help fill some of the extra hours.

  “Intercom to Pilot!”

  Yerusha started. The voice belonged to Phillipe Delasandros, Cheney’s relief.

  “Pilot here, Del, what’s going on?”

  There was a brief pause. “The proximity alarm, actually.”

  It’s too soon. Too soon! Yerusha dropped the towel and bolted for the hatch. “I’m there!”

  She barrelled out into the corridor, almost straight through Baldassare Sundar. She took the stairs two at a time and dove through the bridge hatch as soon as it opened wide enough for her body. The alarm filled the bridge with its steady, unmistakable wail.

  Delasandros, heavily built and heavily freckled, jumped out of the Station One chair a split second before she threw herself into it.

  She threw herself into her chair. “Strap in!” she bellowed to Del, who seem to have frozen in place.

  The proximity alarm rang for only two reasons. The first was when the ship was in normal space and getting too close to something that might do it some damage, like another ship. The second was when it was close enough to a gravity well that it had to make the jump back into normal space, and nobody had done any of the manual preparations.

  Which nobody had, because this wasn’t supposed to be happening for another four hours.

  “Intercom to Pasadena!” She hauled her straps around herself. “Strap down! Strap down! We’re jumping in! I repeat…”

  A green light in the corner of the board turned red. In the next second, the general security alarms began shrieking. The accumulators had already come to life. Yerusha’s stomach suddenly tried to crawl up her throat. Outside the window, the silver wall burst and she saw darkness.

  Fractured, flawed, twisted, splintered… Yerusha stabbed at the keys and raised the cameras. The view screens flickered into life and displayed a meaningless array of stars against the vacuum. In the distance, on the port screen, burned a red cinder the size of her thumbnail. It was not the sun that belonged to the Vicarage’s system. It wasn’t even close.

  All sensation left her hands and they slipped off the boards to dangle uselessly at her sides.

  “Intercom to Pilot!” Schyler’s voice barked out of the intercom. “Report!”

  “We’re lost.” She couldn’t force her voice above a whisper. “We’re lost.”

  Schyler paused for a single heartbeat.

  “Intercom to Engine!” he bawled. “Shut down acceleration to minimum! Intercom to Pasadena! All hands prepare for free fall!” She could hear the thud of footfalls and realized Schyler was running as he shouted.

  The sharp orders gave Yerusha something to focus on. She automatically checked around her station, looking for loose objects that would need securing. She found none. She hit the catch on her chair, locking it into the grooves in the deck. Del had already secured his station and was turning nervous, over-sized eyes towards her.

  The hatch cycled open. “Pilot, what the hell happened?” demanded Schyler.

  “I don’t know!” Her eye strayed toward the distant red star and she wanted to pound the boards in frustration. Instead, she snatched her pen out of her pocket. Working with both hands she called up the flight program and the execution records. She displayed them side-by-side on the screen and ran her gaze down the patterns. Times, bearings, everything matched exactly. According to the records, everything had gone right.

  “Intercom to Watch.” Al Shei’s strained voice rang across the bridge. “We’re going to need a report down here, soon.”

  “We’re working on it,” replied Schyler in a flat voice.

  “Intercom to Engine and Houston.” Yerusha blanked the records off the board. “I need diagnostics on the engine execution and the timing routines between eleven-twenty and thirteen-twenty.”

  “They’re yours,” answered Lipinski. There was closely guarded anger in his voice.

  “Transferring.” Al Shei sounded even less pleased than Lipinski.

  Yerusha couldn’t blame her. The red star sat square in the middle of the port screen, rebuffing all attempts at denial. Either something had gone wrong with the ship’s systems, or Jemina Yerusha of Free Home Titania who had programmed this jump had committed a capital error.

  She felt light-headed. The straps pressed against her chest. Gravity was leaving them. She tried not to let it distract her. The data from Al Shei and Lipinski wrote itself across her memory boards. She pulled up her station data and scanned the stats as fast as she could.

  Her heart began to beat heavy and slow.

  “Pilot?” Schyler’s voice cut across the bridge. “What’ve you got?”

  Yerusha shook herself. “It’s the clocks.” She looked up to see his entire face gathered into his frown. “The internal clocks have been reset so we mistimed the jump. Here.” She wrote the transfer command and shot a copy of her display across to Schyler’s station. “At least a dozen of the internal timers have been reset. Even if we had checked back with The Gate, we wouldn’t have known about it.” Yerusha wasn’t sure why she added that. Maybe to make herself believe it. “It’s all internal.”

  The blood drained from Schyler’s face. “What the hell happened to the diagnostics?”

  “I don’t know.” Yerusha clenched her fingers around her pen to keep it from floating away. “I don’t know.”

  Schyler swallowed a couple of times before he found his voice. “All right, Pilot, you get to work and find out where in all the heavens we are. I’m going to report to Al Shei, and then the crew.” His eyes were hard and focused on her. “We need an answer soon, Pilot.”

  She didn’t even bother to reply, she just turned her gaze back down towards her boards and screens.

  All right, all right, Yerusha tried to organize her thoughts. Now I know what happened. Now I’ve just got to figure out where it’s left us. She turned her attention to the view screens with their scattering of white stars. To her naked eye, they all looked the same. But they had names and numbers and fixed positions in the sky and each carried its unique spectrum. Spectrum analysis took time, but, some of those stars would be pulsars with their own signatures and their own listing in her database. Distance from pulsars could be easily measured because of the regularity of their signals. If she could find more than one, she could greatly shorten the search by starting a process of triangulation that would eventually narrow down their location to within a few thousand clicks. It would be close enough.

  Holding her pen tightly in her aching fingers, Yerusha began to write up a search program for the cameras. “All right, Del. Let’s find out how far it is to home.”

  “… she’s working as fast as she can, but she can’t give me an estimate on how long it’ll take to track down a set of pulsars we can use as position markers.” Even through the intercom, Al Shei could hear Schyler’s deep breath. “Do you want me to get Lipinski going on the clocks, or finding the bank lines?”

  Al Shei took her own deep breath and felt her chest press against the free-fall straps that held her in her chair. She forced her hands to uncurl from the fists she had clenched them into. The familiar walls of Main Engineering seemed to be leaning in on her, waiting to hear what she was going to do about this one. Her ship had been taken from her, again. It was being turned against her and her people, again.

  “Find the bank lines. We may need to send out a distress signal.” She didn’t say what Schyler already k
new. They had enough fuel and reaction mass for one more jump, and it had to be a short one, or the life support systems would start eating into the fuel they needed for the accumulators to get back into normal space. If there was no place they could reach, they would have to send out a distress call. The chances of anyone being willing to answer a distress signal without claiming the Pasadena as salvage were very, very small. There was no equivalent of a navy or a coast guard for Settled Space, never mind the middle of nowhere. They might, however, get lucky. They might not be too far from help. There might still be something they could do.

  “Get the third shift into action, Watch. Get everybody operational and see that the section heads are briefed. You’ll have to brief my people as well. I’ve got Ianiai and Javerri down in the engines now, checking for additional problems. They’ll have to work with Lipinski’s people to get those clocks in order.” She tried to sound brisk, but she had very little strength for it. The part of her that was not fighting down panic was seething with rage. They were lost. Lost and low on their primary resources. If Yerusha took too long finding out where they were, if they were too far from a settlement… there would be nothing to do but get as close to home as they could, and then admit they were stranded. The Pasadena could then be claimed as salvage by whoever came out and got them, even if they were still living to greet them. It was an ancient law from the days when ships just sailed on the ocean, and everybody liked it, so it got honored across Settled Space.

  Maybe the Pasadena could get a little farther on a deuterium-tritium reaction, but the fast neutrinos the reaction produced would pulverize the engine ceramics. It would also expose the crew to levels of radiation that the Sundars’ sick bay had no way of coping with.

  There could be only one cause for this. Only one person who could make an answer.

  “Intercom to Al Shei.” It was Lipinski. “What’s the status on…”