by J. Naomi Ay
"I thought you being an Airforce officer that you'd be very conservative," he said. "It's hard enough dating a woman who carries a gun and swaggers around like some macho pilot. I don't want to listen to your whacked out political opinions, too. I think it's time we started seeing other people." He kissed her on the cheek, and patted her on the butt before walking away. Hannah was tempted to take out her gun and shoot him in his butt. She didn’t. She wasn’t that far gone.
The last call Hannah made was to her ex-husband, who listened patiently until she had completely finished speaking. Either that, or he had set down the phone, and walked away for a few minutes.
"I think you need to go back on those anti-depressants," he said when he came back.
Hannah requested a transfer to space-duty. She had been on the ground, working as an adjunct to a General for several years now. It was light duty with no stress, and it provided her with privileged and secured information. She knew all about the new spaceships and where they were going and why.
"Why do you want to start flying again, Hannah?" the General asked, her request form sitting on his desk. "Why would you want to test an experimental craft?"
"I'm tired of a desk job," she shrugged non-committedly. "I'm ready to get back in the sky. I’ve always wanted to fly among the stars."
"Tell me right away if you change your mind." He scrawled his name across the bottom. "I will always have a place for you here."
"What if there is no here?" she asked, taking the form, and heading to the door.
"Then there will be no point in flying away either."
Hannah got back in shape. She trained for a year, learning how the spaceship flew, and understanding all the systems that could go wrong. She worked out every day to avoid the space sickness, and she went through batteries of tests, both physical and psychological, before she could be deemed fit for duty.
"You have a history of anti-depressants, and anti-anxiety drugs," the doctor said while scanning her brain with his hand-held device.
Hannah wasn't going to lie about it, and there was no way she could deny it, for it was on her personnel record in black and white.
"Trauma," she replied, "A few years ago."
"That's why you stopped flying," he continued, probing her neck.
"For a while."
"Why do you want to go to space?" He looked down her throat.
"I'm the best one to fly one of those ships," she responded. "And nobody will miss me if it crashes."
She didn’t know if that was the right answer or not. Maybe they just needed a woman to balance their equal opportunity quotas. In any case, the doctor signed her off, and bad history aside, she was given command of the Shrotru, which meant when the time came, the Duke and his family would be the passengers.
Hannah looked up from the sink and into the mirror. Behind her, something gleamed in the dull, fluorescent light. It was shaped like an orb, at first, before twisting and turning into something else.
“Kari-fa!” Hannah screamed, spinning around to face her son, before his image faded into a haze of sparkling stars.
Hannah wondered if she was going insane. It could be space sickness, although she had done everything possible to avoid it. She exercised daily, drank plenty of water, took all her vitamins, and furthermore, she had already logged nearly a year’s worth of time before this voyage even began. If she was going to suffer from the debilitating condition, she would have done so during training, during her first cruise in space. That’s what all the doctors had said, but then again, what did they know? Sometimes, the sickness infected one’s brain instead of their muscles, which made it harder to diagnose, much harder to confirm.
“I’m going to take a break for a few minutes, Cap’n. Do you need anything from the galley?”
“No thanks, Lewy,” Hannah snorted, as the galley was nothing more than a shelf full of protein wafers and water. “When you get back, I’ll go run the daily check on the system boxes.”
“Yes, Ma’am. I won’t be long.” The crewman smiled broadly, lifting his hand in a small wave.
Hannah forced her lips into a smile, noting the gleam in the crewman’s eye. He liked her. That was obvious. Maybe, he even liked her too much. Hannah was certain this was due only to the extreme circumstances in which they were living. If they had met on a street corner in Kudisha, or worked anywhere other than this tiny ship, they’d never have spoken, never had acknowledged that the other was alive.
They were too different. Lewy was a farm boy, and Hannah was a big city girl. He was enlisted, and she was an officer with a university degree in advanced aeronautics. She was divorced, and he never married. Besides all that, Hannah was just past forty, and Lewy was thirty-one, nearly ten years her junior. It was only these conditions, the uncertainty of whether or not they would be alive tomorrow that made either of them even contemplate a liaison.
“No, no, no,” Hannah grumbled, as the cockpit door swished shut. No liaisons, no trysts. No nothing.
Hannah leaned back in her chair, and put her feet up on the console, a posture unbecoming of an officer, especially the one in command. If any of her crew had seen her do this, they would have been shocked as she was normally quite uptight, strictly by the book enforcing military procedure, although her own commander wasn’t alive to see or care.
She gazed out the window at the stars, at the galaxies filled with brightly colored dust, and formations as unique as the mountains and valleys on her home planet. Despite her fear of doing so, she searched the horizon for the orb, for that odd glowing light that had turned into the image of her son.
There was nothing. No orbs. No life of any kind. No aliens who might rescue them, or annihilate them instead.
Hannah knew there were other creatures throughout the galaxy. The King had sent probes to a host of different planets searching a place for their new home.
Rehnor was populated by a species not unlike themselves. She had seen pictures. She had seen their faces, which did mean they’d be welcoming the Karupatas intrusion.
“Ach, chill out, Hannah,” she chastised herself. “Think positive. This is a whole new world, a whole new opportunity to start your life over. You wanted a reset and now, you’ve got it. The Rehnorians will love us, if we manage to make it there alive.”
She had this vision of traveling this great distance, spending a year suffering in this tin can, only to step from this craft into someone’s soup pot. Boiled Hannah and her crew would become the natives’ dinner.
“The Duke and his family ought to be very tender,” she chuckled, once again checking the horizon for the orb. “All that blue blood and noble meat. Perhaps, the natives will eat them, and spare the rest of us. After all, I’m extra tough, and chewy, hard as nails.”
Hannah sighed, and glanced at the control console, noting all systems were functioning as they should. She looked at her watch and wondered what was taking Lewy so long. Did she miss him? Maybe, she really needed a little affair with a man who could make her feel soft and warm, instead of always so cold and hard.
“It’s the space sickness,” she announced, aloud. Why else would she even contemplate such a thing?
Actually, now that she thought on it, the vision of the orb and the image of her son had to be a mild case of the brain kind. In addition to the delusion, she wasn’t sleeping no matter how exhausted she became, and during her work hours, she felt like her head was in a fog.
“That’s it,” she decided, resolving to ask Lewy for his opinion when he returned. “Strange things happen out in space, and it doesn’t matter if they’ve never happened before. It could be space dust in the ventilation system, or stray ions which are screwing with my physiology. I’m millions of miles away from my own star. I’m messed up.”
That explanation seemed to satisfy the passengers when she had told them the same last week,, although the little girl had looked upon Hannah with doubt.
“I saw the orb before,” she said. “When I was home. It spoke to me, on the day we left,
right before we came aboard.”
“You’ve definitely got the space sickness, Reva,” Torim had replied. “It’s totally gone to your head. It’s too late for you. We’ll have to dump you out the garbage chute.”
Hannah was fairly confident the girl wasn’t sick, as she seemed as normal as any preteen. She figured the girl’s memory was just distorted with all this trauma and stress. Not that Hannah would know. It had been years since she was that age, and her son never made it that far. The boy had died when he was only seven years old, four months, and three days, which in hindsight was probably a good thing. Otherwise, at this girl’s same age, he’d be dying right now.
“We’ve got a problem,” Lewy announced, the cockpit door swishing open once again.
“What?”
Quickly, Hannah removed her feet from the console. She sat up in her chair, and ran a hand through her wildly curly hair, brushing back a mop of dark blonde curls. Her hair felt thick and dirty, despite the special shampoo she applied every other day. It was supposed to work without water, and it did, but not that well. On the other hand, who cared? Lewy, apparently, liked her just the way she was, and if Pori came anywhere near her, she’d be tempted to shoot him.
“The little boy has it.” Lewy opened a panel in the wall behind the console, and removed the medical kit.
“How bad?”
“Severe,” the crewman replied, disappearing once again.
Hannah frowned, and stared out at the vast array of endless stars. The little boy was going to die, but strangely, she didn’t care. In fact, her response was surprisingly numb. Another child was going to perish, another would die at about the same age as her son. Another parent would experience a loss as painful as a stake driven through their heart, although after observing the detached Duke and Duchess, Hannah wasn’t certain they’d even notice.
“Pori,” Hannah called, leaving the bridge to enter the crew quarters where the crewman was snoring loudly on a bunk. In the cot on the opposite wall, the Duke’s manservant Mills was also sleeping, although his eyes flew open to watch Hannah as she came in. “Pori, I need you to take the Com.”
“Shit,” Pori grumbled, shrugging her away.
“Get up now,” Hannah barked. “I expect you at the Com in less than a minute.”
“Or, you’ll what?” Pori demanded, rolling over on his back. His eyes opened fully, languidly taking in the length of the Captain’s body. “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t you join me in here? Come on, Hannah. How long has it been since you’ve had a man? Who knows, maybe it’ll improve your mood.”
“Thirty seconds.”
“Old girl, I’m quick, but I’ll need more time than that.”
In no mood to fool around, Hannah took the gun out of her pocket and placed the muzzle on Pori’s forehead.
“At the Com.”
“Nope,” the crewman laughed, pushing the gun away. “Nothing, not even a good fuck, will make you less of a bitch.”
The safety clicked off, and Hannah’s finger moved on the trigger.
“Alright! Alright! I’m going.” Pori dragged himself upright, and shuffled to his feet.
Hannah pocketed the pistol, and then, headed to the common room where Lewy was kneeling at the little boy’s side. The Lady Reva was wringing her hands, tears flooding down her face, while the maid, Clara was trying to coax the youngster to move his feet.
“You’ve got to get your muscles going, little dude,” Torim called from across the room. “See? Like me. Come on, you and I can do some squats.”
The child looked on helplessly, while Lewy coaxed him to drink.
He was too far gone, Hannah decided, and walked away. She went down below to the black box bay, and ran her daily regimen of tests. She noted three faults, and reset a series of automatic controls.
“I am too hard,” she told herself, spending an exorbitant amount of time performing tasks which should have taken only a matter of minutes.
By the time, Hannah returned upstairs, the little boy had passed on. Throughout it all, the Duke and Duchess had remained in their private quarters below.
“What shall we do with the body?” Lewy asked, while the maid comforted the young girl.
“The refuse chute,” Hannah replied, returning to her bridge. “Along with all of his toy trains.”
Look for Journey to Rehnor, Departure Episode 3 Kirkut
In February 2015