“Yes,” Diane agrees. “The Patel eel. She was rather quick in claiming that one.”
All right. Go in for the kill. Give her your one flimsy piece of evidence and give it last, and give it so hard that it sounds like it’s the only important fact, and it’ll stick in her head.
“Yes, so, without having any certitude on almost anything else, we do know that if there was a physical malady that afflicted the colonists, it’s now confined to those pods. Jaime’s people are clean, but they’re convinced that something afflicted their ancestors. I think their occasional flare-ups have been psychosomatic. And Helena agrees with me.”
Diane looks at Helena.
“Do you?”
The conflict is clear on the goon’s face, but she doesn’t lie.
“I do.”
Diane sighs, long and loud, a product of staying on her crutches for a lengthy period of time.
“Then in your estimation, the witch hunt that ravaged The Manifest Destiny’s population a hundred years ago or so… was successful?”
It’s her idea now. She’s suggested it. Drive it home now with skepticism.
“Well, anything is possible, madam director. I guess what you say could’ve happened.” I shrug. “I certainly can’t come up with a more reasonable explanation.”
She nods. Excellent. You’ve got her on the hook. Reel her in.
“In my estimation, madam director, it would be contrary to the company’s best interests if we didn’t at least attempt to find out what’s in Pod Nine.”
Now the cards are all on the table. Alea iacta est. Helena won’t take it sitting down, but I’ve already trumped her.
“I think this is an unnecessary risk, madam director,” Helena growls.
The Diane-o-gram eyes her suspiciously.
“How so?”
“We have been fortunate so far. And I cannot emphasize how much luck is not a planning method. But so far we haven’t been exposed to this infestation that the colonists insist is down in the bowels of the ship.”
“That’s a very conservative argument,” I say. “Of course, you might also say that whatever there is to be exposed to, we’ve already been exposed to it. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they used to say, don’t you think, madam director?”
“Personnel have value to the company, too. Insurance policies are expensive. And retraining is expensive, too. Like I said, we have had good fortune. Why test it?”
Why, indeed? Every instinct, every spark of intuition I have in me is screaming at me to agree with Helena, to give in, to, in fact, throw my full-throated agreement into the ring. Not only is Helena right, she’s damn right.
But there’s a monster in me. There’s a little nugget of ambition in me so strong it powers me like the singularity powering the Borgwardt.
“It seems to me,” I find myself saying, “that failing to at least attempt to complete our mission is the bigger risk.”
Helena stares at me. The Diane-o-gram nods.
“I’m inclined to agree. Let’s take a shot at it. You know, Paige, I wasn’t sure if you had what it took to do this job. Academics aren’t always made of the right stuff for field work. But right now I think I made the right choice in hiring you. I think you’ll go far in Hestle.”
The hologram flickers and vanishes. In the now dim light Helena is still staring at me. Her mood is unmistakable.
“You’re a real mercenary, you know that?”
“Just thinking about what’s best for the company,” I lie.
“Mm hmm.”
A clattering from inside Pod Eight interrupts our staredown.
Twenty-Two
Becs, in her galley whites, is wheeling a mobile food cart towards the prophylactic airlock.
“There you two are!”
She pats her hands down on her apron, then, thinking better of it, holds her hands under a small disinfectant ray on the side of the cart. When the ray has finished its business, the top of the cart opens up hydraulically.
“All right,” she says, “I know you two are busy, so it’s finger food all around for all the salvagers. I fed up the colonists on rolls and fiber bars, but for you girls I’ve got sandwiches. Turkey, roast beef…”
“I’m not hungry,” Helena states flatly.
Becs scowls.
“Don’t be that way, Big H. I know you. I’ve watched you. You don’t mess around in my galley. Listen, I’ll make you your favorite: roast beef and mozzarella, how’s that sound?”
Helena bites her lower lip. Becs looks between the two of us. She’s not dumb. She realizes she’s interrupted a fight or showdown of some sort. Either she doesn’t care, is hoping to defuse it, or is just really, really devoted to her job.
“Look, don’t you two worry about being stingy. The company picks up the tab when you’re actively working. Zero chits, girls. I know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but, well, this is the free lunch cart.”
Helena relents.
“All right, but, just, don’t make it so dry this time.”
“Ha ha! I knew it.” Becs rubs her hands together. “Mayonnaise and horseradish, right? Kind of beats the purpose of finger food when you’re slopping it all around, but, hey, I’m just the fucking slop salesman, what do I care what you drip drop in here?”
She slathers two different kinds of white goo onto Helena’s pre-made sandwich and hands it over.
“What about you, Ambroziak? No fucking pot noodles this time. Unless you want me to ladle it into your hands.”
I can’t help but smile. Whatever the Broatoan’s intentions, she has, indeed, successfully defused the tenseness.
“I don’t know. Do you have egg salad?”
“I got tuna salad.”
“Perfect. As long as the company’s paying for it.”
“Oh, yeah. Wouldn’t want you to splurge on 100% albacore. Lettuce, tomato?”
I nod at each of her suggestions. She hands the sandwich over.
“Now what am I looking at here?”
“This?” I say between bites. “This leads into Pod Nine. We’re going to open it up and find out what’s on the other side.”
“I should probably scarper, huh?”
I shrug.
“Unless you want to witness history.”
Helena growls, somehow polishing off her massive meat and bread concoction as I’ve only taken a few bites out of mine.
“Unless you want your ass shot at. Or worse.”
“Never had my ass shot at before. Hey, it’s not like we can lose two food and beverage chiefs in the same expedition, can we?”
Helena is struck silent, perhaps feeling the sting of being reminded of her failure on Lilah’s part.
“You guys really don’t mind if I watch?”
“No, I don’t mind,” I say.
I look to Helena, but she remains stonily silent. Nodding, I put down what’s left of my sandwich. Unlike Helena, I don’t actually have much of an appetite. Like all those times in the Yloft stacks, I’m working, and when I’m working, all bodily concerns fade away until I nearly piss my pants.
I remove my jotter from the pedestal where it had been generating the hologram of the boss. I press a few buttons.
“Operations,” a cheery voice says, “this is Kelly.”
“Hey, Kelly,” I reply, happy to recognize my favorite ops geek, “this is Paige Ambroziak over on The Manifest Destiny.”
“Well, howdy there, Miss Explorer Extraordinaire! I just heard from the director about you.”
“Am I fired? Already?”
“Right out the next space-facing airlock. Those were her orders.”
“Oh, well, can’t argue with that. Tell my widow I died a hero.”
Kelly giggles.
“What can I do you for, Paige?”
“We’re ready down here. Can you close the Pod Eight-facing hatch?”
“You got it.”
The hatch slides closed with a loud thump that causes Becs to jump. She rubs her hands
together.
“Oh, man, you know, I’ve been surfing the ink for an age now, but I almost never get to get out of the office. This is some exciting stuff.”
“Maybe you should be thankful you’ve never been exposed to any real danger. It’s when people decide to start doing things that aren’t really their job, that everyone starts dying.”
Maybe that was a dig at me. I don’t care. I know what the rest of my career is going to look like, and it’s not going to be ending up as a low-level shipboard security chief in middle age like Helena. Hestle is going to remember my name. It’s going to be etched on a plaque somewhere, if not in a hallway under a portrait of my face along with all the other people of consequence down through the years.
“Okay, Kelly,” I say, “please open the Pod Nine-facing hatch.”
Helena levels her beam rifle toward the hatch.
“Your wish is my command,” the ops controller responds.
I drop my jotter into my pocket as the hatch opens. The hydraulics grind, and I can tell Kelly is working some magic, making the hatch roll up and down to get it to open all the way. These things always seem straightforward to the end user, but ops always seems to have to canoodle the network to get the supposedly ‘automated systems’ to do what they’re supposed to do. In this case, there seems to be decades’ worth of dust and debris on the far side of the hatch, and a great cloud is kicked up as it finally, gradually opens.
Becs is the first to gasp. A Broatoan, her eyes are used to seeing through such pollution. But Helena is quickly swiveling her beam rifle to and fro. She’s probably cursing me in her head, but thankfully not out loud just yet.
Eyes gleam in the low light like cats’. I glance left. There are half a dozen down there. I glance right. Maybe even more on the other end of the corridor.
I try to slowly slip my hand into the pocket of my overalls and press the emergency button on my jotter, but even the slight movement causes the others to scrabble forward, hooting and banging on the ceiling, bulkheads, and even the glass of the hydroponics gardens.
They hold makeshift weapons of rebar and tools scavenged from around the ship. And they are dressed not as cosmonauts, but as savages, in loincloths ripped from towels or former pieces of clothing. Many lurid tales dance the spaceways of lost colonies and drift-less wrecks reduced to savagery and cannibalism, but I have always taken them with a grain of salt. Aren’t humans in some fundamental way better than this? Wouldn’t we weather the difficulties of isolation and deprivation better than being reduced to our Neanderthal or Cro-Magnon roots?
I raise my hands in surrender, and Becs does the same. Helena refuses to lower her weapon, and the savages are staring at her, trying to decided what to do about it.
“What do we do now?” Becs hisses.
“Is operations still monitoring?” Helena growls.
We wait. There is silence, undeniable, seemingly never-ending silence. Something has cut us off. They may even be monitoring the situation and just unable to communicate with us.
“Guess we’re on our own,” Helena says, stepping forward, in front of me and Becs.
The savages hoot and wave their weapons at us.
“Yeah, I hear you, assholes. Back. The fuck. Off.”
Without lowering her beam rifle, Helena kicks Becs’s food cart forward, toppling it and sending lettuce, pickles, and a bevy of condiments splattering to the deck. The savages back away from the clattering metal in alarm, and Helena takes the opportunity to plug the nearest one through the shoulder. She begins firing indiscriminately into the crowd, and as quickly as they came, the writhing mass of limbs and hair and muscles retreats back into Pod Nine. Helena holds her rifle leveled at the ingress point.
“Get ops on the fucking phone,” she hisses at me.
“Right, right,” I say, fumbling into my pocket and pulling out my jotter.
The signal is dead…of course. That alone should probably have triggered something over on the Borgwardt, but exactly what I can’t even venture to guess. Perhaps a rescue party. Perhaps something more...permanent. In any case, we never get to see what their response is.
Two small clay pots came flying in through the ingress point. When they smash against the bulkhead, a noxious green gas fills the room.
Helena shouting, “Get down!” is the last thing I remember hearing, before falling and cracking my head against the metal deck.
Twenty-Three
I awaken to the sensation of Tina repeatedly slapping my face. Although I’ve seen this sort of thing in movies, coming from a medical professional I have to question the clinical efficacy of such behavior.
“Back with us?” she asks absently, looking elsewhere.
“Yeah, I think so,” I moan.
I reach up and gingerly touch the side of my head. Tiny ribbons of skin dance under my touch, the bizarre feeling of flesh mending at hyper-accelerated speed. A neurostim pack is attached to the other side of my head, and I glance down to see another medkit attached to my heart.
“I was in bad shape?”
“Dead. Clinically. It’s no small matter getting concussed. I had to fight for half an hour to get you breathing on your own again. And this did not help matters.”
She dangles my armband in front of my face. I blush and reach for it, hissing in pain. She holds it out of my reach. I’m as weak as a kitten from the neurostim, and as hungry as a horse. I’m a kitten-horse.
“You can’t just fiddle with your biochemistry like you’re mixing a cocktail. You know, every time you dose yourself you make it that much harder for a medical professional to help you when you get hurt. Like you just did. You know that, don’t you?”
“I would nod, but my head is killing me.”
I doubt there’s much defiance in my eyes. Her glare softens.
“By rights, I should take this from you.”
“It’s not illegal.”
I sound like a junkie. Maybe I am.
“No. But I can give you medical orders. So, do I need to take this from you?”
“I’ll stop. While I’m shipboard.”
She looks me up and down. That’s not a junkie’s answer. A junkie would’ve promised to stop forever. I made a much smaller promise. Oh, fuck. Am I playing her? Normally when I’m playing someone I feel like I’m conducting a symphony in my head. Right now, though, it just seems to be flowing. It’s become subconscious for me.
Am I a bad person?
“All right,” she says, reluctantly rolling up the armband and stuffing it into one of the cargo pockets at the bottom of my pants. Somewhere I’ll have to very deliberately go digging to get it back.
I rise up to my elbows. Prosser, Tampa, and Helena are gathered in a corner, quietly not quite stage-whispering. Becs’s food cart is unmoved from its position, kicked over on the deck, with bits of slowly rotting vegetables and sauces splattered around the hold.
“Where’s Becs?”
Tina looks at me, reluctant to speak, then looks towards the now-closed hatch to Pod 9.
“They took her?”
Tina doesn’t respond. The goons are practically shouting now, their attempts at feigning secrecy forgotten.
“We should get Quinn,” Tampa is saying.
“Not a chance,” Helena replies. “That one’s a fucking liability.”
“Three’s not a great number. Four’s better,” Prosser points out.
“Quinn’s trained, at least. She may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but…”
Helena cuts Tampa off.
“No. Better three that are competent than a fourth we’ll have to carry.”
“I’ll go,” I say, rising from my prone position.
The three security goons glance at me. I struggle to my feet.
“No, really, I want to. I feel responsible for… for Becs.”
I’m greeted with three unreadable stares. I glance at Tina.
“Will you tell them I’m okay to go? I’m not an invalid. I’m… I’m good. I want to go
. I should go.”
Silence.
“They know,” Tina replies.
Slowly, Helena lowers her beam rifle so that it’s pointing at the ground. She walks towards me.
“I wouldn’t take you if everyone else in the company was dead. You’re a careerist. Careerists leave bodies in their wake. I hope to Hell we pull the cook out of that lion’s den there. But if we don’t… as I know we probably won’t… I hope you never enjoy another promotion again. You’ll get them. Oh, I know you’ll get them. You’re slimy enough to slither up that corporate ladder. But every time you do, I hope that girl’s face haunts you at night.”
She shoves me and I’m surprised at how far I don’t fly. She didn’t mean it. She’s an immense ox of a woman, and she didn’t mean it. I’m not even worth shoving to the deck.
“Get her out of here, doc.”
Tina nods, and not-so-gently urges me out of the airlock. The last thing I hear is Helena contacting ops and asking Kelly to close the Pod Eight-facing hatch. It slams in my face. I look to Tina.
“I didn’t know… I didn’t want Becs to get hurt.”
Tina shrugs.
“Helena takes everything personally. It’s what makes her a good goon.”
“But you believe me, right? I didn’t think anyone was going to get hurt.”
“If you say so.”
I grab her. I’m surprised at myself. I’ve gone from the kitten who could barely move to a tiger. Something’s running through me, something stronger than the meds in the armband rolled up and stuffed in my lower cargo pocket right now ever were: a crisis of identity.
“Tell me you believe me. Tell me right now. You. You forgive me, right? I’m not… I’m not a slimy careerist or anything like that. I just do what I think is right. You believe me, don’t you?”
Tina stares at me for a moment. She pauses before speaking.
“My mother used to tell me that if I was feeling guilty, it was because I had done something I deserved to feel guilty about. Of course, she was an emotionally abusive fuck who could’ve made a fortune as a travel agent if people paid for guilt trips.”
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