Carrier

by Timothy Johnson

  It caught Stellan off guard. They'd never spoken of religion or faith before, so Stellan's first instinct, as odd as it may have been, was that she was joking. Topics of conversation with depth weren't really Wendy's style, and when Stellan saw on her face that she was serious, he was surprised to find it didn't feel awkward.

  "What do you mean?"

  "When I was young, this old man used to come around my dad's shop. He'd just sit inside the store and ask people who came in if they were God-fearing people. I never understood it, but it always stuck with me.

  "When I looked down and saw all that blood, my first thought was someone had spilled something on me. I didn't feel any pain, even when I realized a bullet had gone through me, and I thought, this is what dying feels like. My body knows it's done, so there's no point in bothering me with pain. Until you were looking down on me. I didn't feel pain until I felt hope that I might live. But even then, I couldn't stop thinking about how afraid I was, and I wondered what it meant to fear God. My mind jumped back to that old man and my curiosity."

  "It's funny how, when you're convinced it's over, your mind brings back things you didn't even know were still there," Stellan said, and he thought he'd given himself away. Wendy looked at him with a mix of contempt and curiosity, and with a nod of his head, Stellan apologized for the interruption and asked her to continue.

  "What does it mean to fear something that's supposed to love you?" she asked. "The devil I understand. You do bad things; you get punished. Fearing God doesn't make sense because he's supposed to reward you for being a good person. You're supposed to love and fear him? He loves you, but then you get shot? I wonder if it's maybe not him you're supposed to fear but facing him. Judgment. Scrutiny for all your sins. It's yourself you're supposed to fear. Your own worst enemy."

  "You getting holy on me, kid?" Stellan asked.

  "Maybe."

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "You didn't answer mine."

  Wendy's gaze persisted. She wanted an answer. She wouldn't let him leave without giving one. He wasn't sure which question she wanted an answer to, but he thought they essentially were the same. The scar was a mark of a lesson he'd learned, and that lesson was about as close to the existence of God as he ever got. So he gave the only answer he could, and it was honest.

  "God scares the hell out of me."

  Five

  When Stellan exited Wendy's room, he found Daelen across the hall, gazing at what he didn't know was Rick's door. He knew something was troubling her. His presence startled her from her thoughts.

  Meeting each other felt like meeting for the first time again. They were each in their own place emotionally, and neither of them could tell what the other was thinking or feeling. Neither could be sure of what they were thinking or feeling themselves. In some ways, they were estranged, separated by the loss of their unborn child with no time to grieve and heal.

  "What are you doing up?" Stellan asked. "You should be resting."

  "Can't. Loads to do. Listen, we need to talk."

  "Now? Do you have any idea what's going on out there?"

  "Precisely."

  She walked toward the end of the hall, and even though he was confused, Stellan had no choice but to follow.

  When they entered her office and she closed the door, her face was cold and hard. She looked like she was trying to not appear frightened, but she couldn't help it.

  Stellan couldn't have known, though, that seeing him had taken Daelen's breath away. He didn't understand the measure of his effect on her. She remembered that feeling when she first saw him all those years ago in the subway tunnels beneath her burning home city. She found a broken man for whom she felt a unique attraction to heal. She understood him then, as he kneeled on the tile floor, a blank stare across his face, water trickling between his legs from a burst pipe, draining down the stairs and flooding the tunnels below.

  He'd been a believer, a killer, as much as she hated to admit it, and he was realizing that path led only to destruction. The world couldn't be forged in fire, and there was a kind of beauty in his breakdown, like the royal city, a transformation into something diminished yet better. As painful as it was, razing a forest meant fertile soil. She could help him rebuild. They could start again together, and the Atlas had been a great place for that. A new beginning. A reset button. A second chance.

  This time, though, she had some rebuilding of her own to do.

  The problem was he reminded her of her failures. She feared that feeling might never go away, that every time she looked at him, she'd remember how she couldn't find the strength to tell him about their child and how, if she'd been a better doctor, she might have had nothing to regret.

  She understood it was how Stellan felt in those tunnels, acknowledging the full weight of responsibility. Everything he'd done since had been to lift himself from that dark place, to right the cosmic balance of all his deeds.

  And even though she thought she understood Stellan better than she ever had, she had never felt so far away from him.

  "Are you okay?" he asked.

  She wanted to tell him how deep her grief went. She wanted to break down, to fall into his arms and let the sadness flow out of her like extracting poison. But it wasn't a time for weakness.

  "Have you ever heard of the Pandora Protocol?" she asked.

  "I'm sorry. What?"

  "It's the protocol of protocols." She opened a document on her workstation. "In the event that we encounter a biological hazard, there's the chance an alien bacteria or virus could infect the human anatomy."

  She could tell she'd blindsided him and that his mind was struggling to catch up.

  "In the last twenty-four hours, we've seen more injuries from violence than in the last twenty-four years. All since we left the Shiva. All since Tom."

  "Let me get this straight," Stellan said. "You think we picked up something that's causing our people to go mad? And now you want put the ship on lockdown based on a theory?"

  "Quarantine," she said. "I'm saying what if there's a reason my infirmary is now a triage center? What if there's a reason you're running all over the ship? I've seen this kind of thing before. Have you seen any of these people? I just examined Susanna Barton, who was almost raped by Jude Washington, and she couldn't focus. It was like her brain kept stalling. And then there's Rick. Rick's in the room I just left. He says, ever since the accident, when the man he was helping bit him, he's experienced memory gaps."

  Stellan took a deep breath and released it through puckered lips. He rubbed his head, ruffling his blond hair. "It isn't just the black madness? Like with Edward?"

  "Maybe. But what if it isn't?"

  "I can't believe Jude would—"

  "I know."

  "And Rick. God," he said. "Assuming you're right, what do we do about it? How do we proceed?"

  "The first step is getting Gordon on board. Then he has to issue the command."

  "I'll talk to him," Stellan said, still in disbelief.

  A moment passed where Daelen expected Stellan to leave, but he refused. They stared at each other, and he detected fear in her eyes.

  "Is that all?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  He pressed forward, and she backed away as if frightened.

  "We have to talk about us," Stellan said.

  "I know. I just…"

  "What?"

  "I'm not sure I'm ready. Work's the only thing keeping me going. Besides, it just doesn't seem like a good time. Too much is going on."

  Stellan tried to make sense of what she was saying, and he remembered what Wendy had said about time. "Is that why you didn't tell me? It was never a good time?"

  "That's not fair."

  "You're right," Stellan said. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be insensitive, and I certainly don't want to upset you. It's just confusing, you know?"

  "Yes," she said and then hesitated. "I suppose I didn't tell you because I wasn't sure I was going to keep it."

 
; Even though she spoke softly, Daelen's voice echoed in Stellan's mind.

  "What? How can you say that? How can you even think that?"

  "No children in space," she said with a small voice. "You know this. We have a child, we have to go back to the way things were before."

  "It was our child. Ours. The decision was ours, not yours to make alone."

  She wished she could make him understand her fear, how if they had a child, she couldn't bear to see it grow up without a father, how it took all she had to endure the thought of living without him.

  And then it happened without either of them knowing it or intending it. Like the first cracks in a damn, the grief began to overtake her. That barrier of numbness she'd constructed for herself out of pure willpower vanished, and full power of emotional collapse fell on top of her.

  "You make it when you jump out airlocks," she sobbed. "You make it every time you put your job before me."

  "Don't you put that on me. What happened was tragic, and I only did my job the best I could."

  "That's what I'm saying, love," Daelen said, caressing his cheek. "Something's got to give. What's going to happen if you have to choose between your duty and me? What's going to happen if you have to choose between your duty and a family?"

  He paced to direct some of his anger anywhere but at her. "I didn't do this."

  "No, it wasn't you. I can heal bullet wounds and exposure, but I can't keep my own unborn child safe." And with the realization that all her training and knowledge amounted to nothing if she couldn't save the ones she loved, she understood his fear. She understood he did what he did because, if he couldn't save lives, he had nothing else, nothing but a pit of self-loathing to fall into, something she couldn't save him from.

  Stellan embraced her, and she pressed her face into his chest, the warmth of her tears soaking through his shirt. His anger evaporated. Without knowing it, they were taking the first steps toward recovery. They were healing.

  He whispered into her ear, running his fingers through her hair. "We're going to fix this. And we're going to fix us. There was nothing either of us could have done."

  He suddenly remembered his conversation with Pierce about Skinner. He remembered their suspicion and how agents worked. The confluence of events was their weapon. They manipulated environments to make things work their way so it would appear natural, and he wondered how many people comforted loved ones with the same words he'd just used when, all the while, a Council agent had been to blame. He wondered how many people she'd killed that way, how many spirits she'd broken.

  When Daelen was still and quiet, Stellan again kissed her, embraced her, and told her he loved her.

  "You should go," she said.

  "No. If you're right about this, I'm not leaving you."

  "You have to."

  "No way. I'm done. Pierce can fix it himself."

  "Love," Daelen said, "think of where we are. If this gets out of hand, you're our best hope. You're my best hope. And you can't help anyone from here."

  She was right. His best chance of saving her was leaving. Reluctantly, he stood, gently laying her hands in her lap, and walked toward the door.

  "It's the bites," she whispered.

  "What?" Stellan turned back to his weak, defeated wife and knew he had done that to her. But it had to happen. To rebuild, they had to finish clearing what was broken. They had to raze the forest.

  "It came from soil, so it's probably a pathogen, meaning it's transferrable by body fluid contact. It's in the blood, but it's also in the saliva and other fluids. I don't know everything. Everything we know about pathogens might not even apply. I know Rick was bitten. Others are coming in with bite wounds. For some reason, people are being compelled to bite. It's probably a function of the infection. Even on Earth, we have behavior-altering infections."

  Stellan grimaced.

  "It's in the blood. It's in the bites," she repeated.

  He left her then, still distracted from the one duty he wanted to fulfill. For the entirety of his time away from New Earth, he'd fought to preserve and protect their way of life, but he needed someone to blame for everything that had happened, someone to direct his anger toward.

  Even though he knew a preoccupied mind made mistakes, he also knew, as soon as he found Council Agent Adelynn Skinner, he would kill her.

  Six

  Pierce's cabin was quiet except for the creaking of his wooden chair's back legs, the front legs rising off the ground in protest. He rocked slowly, biting his bottom lip. He rubbed his stubble and stared into nothing, his attention turned inward. The rise and fall of his chest was barely visible, like a man feigning death. The black brick loomed on the desktop as if it sucked all his life into it, a singularity of human emotion and thought.

  The stillness crept over Stellan like icy fingers. He felt a tightening in his shoulders because he wasn't quite sure where to begin trying to make Captain Pierce believe the unbelievable, and all he could think about was the chair's wood splitting with each crack and pop, like snapping twigs. Each sounded like it would be the last before the legs finally gave out under the strain of time, its long career of supporting people brought to a close beneath the weight of a man's nervous habit.

  Instead of breaking the chair, however, Pierce broke the silence.

  "You know, I miss the way things used to be. Some might call me a romantic, but I miss the clarity of it all. I miss the certainty. I miss the not knowing what I know now. I miss the belief."

  "Belief in what?" Stellan asked.

  "Something better. A better world, but you know as well as I do that this is as good as it's going to get. They say it's all downhill when you realize your wheels are just turning. They say you don't know what you had 'til it's gone. So true."

  Stellan knew what Pierce was talking about as only he could because Stellan sometimes felt the same. Pierce longed for the feeling of the path of righteousness they both thought they were on before the revolution, which they'd helped the Council win. Pierce used to say that, sometimes, a little killing was necessary. Purging the bad seeds was good for the rest. Stellan didn't believe that anymore. He thought perhaps Pierce still believed it but had lost the taste for it all the same. Still, wishing to return to those times was the same as wishing for a lie. They might as well have wished for death.

  For the first time in as long as Stellan could remember, he felt like he didn't know Gordon Pierce. He didn't know what the Captain was thinking. That connection they'd shared that served them so well on the battlefield was severed.

  Pierce leaned forward, and the pounding of the chair's front legs on the deck startled Stellan.

  "So what's the big secret that you had to call me into my own cabin for?" Pierce asked.

  "Daelen has a theory that there's a biological hazard on the ship, that we picked up something that's infecting people somehow."

  "I know."

  "How?"

  "It's my ship." Pierce's eyebrows rose.

  It didn't surprise Stellan that Pierce's reaction was not what he anticipated. He knew Pierce was guarding his thoughts and feelings. He didn't know why, however, and not knowing Pierce's motives bothered Stellan more than not being able to predict Pierce's movements. It felt like Pierce was hiding something from him.

  "She thinks we should enact the Pandora Protocol," Stellan said. "Jettison the load. Quarantine the crew. Isolate the infected."

  "We can't jettison the load," Pierce said, his eyes drawn to the black brick, laying like a miniature coffin on his desktop. "We have a mission. We can't just abandon it." Pierce's gaze on the brick bordered on longing.

  "What was that crap you said before about being the first one to cut and run if lives were at risk? And what if the stuff we have in our cargo bays is what's causing the problem?"

  "We don't know that there is a problem. You said it yourself. It's just a theory."

  "What about all the people in medical? And I'm running out of holding cells."

  "I see yo
ur point," Pierce said, looking away from the brick and appearing more thoughtful. "And we have lost lives, but we can't do anything about them now. I understand Daelen's concern and agree with her assessment. It's better we be safe, but we don't jettison the load."

  "It's protocol. No one would blame you. You don't owe the Council anything," Stellan said, and Pierce's gaze fixed on Stellan like a weapon. It was a look Stellan had never been on the other end of. It was the look Pierce gave his adversaries.

  "When the fuck have I ever given a shit about protocol? This is about principle. We owe it to ourselves to try and make good on our mission no matter how FUBAR the situation may get, and retreat is my call to make, not yours."

  "Gordon," Stellan said, "these people aren't soldiers."

  The uncomfortable silence returned. Pierce leaned back in his chair again. The legs groaned in agony.

  "The load stays," Pierce said. "Follow containment procedure. Find a way to determine who's sick. Isolate anyone you suspect. I'm going to turn us around."

  "Turn us around?"

  "The Shiva," Pierce said. "If Daelen's right, they're going to need our help. The men we lent them aren't going to cut it." Stellan detected a hint of worry in Pierce's voice, a slight tremble in his throat, at the mention of Commander Ashland's ship.

  With the decision made, Stellan stood and walked to the Captain's hatch door.

  "We do this right, or no one goes home," Pierce said.

  "That's what I've been trying to tell you," Stellan said. "The Atlas is our home."

  Seven

  Pierce walked the length of the command deck as he had countless times before. This time, though, his boots were heavy like they contained leaden weight. He went with reluctance, with no desire to do what he would have to do, but he would do what was necessary. He hoped Daelen was wrong, but if she was right, he would see them all through it. Well, he would see as many of them through it as he could.

  The department heads continued to sort through requests for protocol responses and had taken to directing security personnel themselves. As Pierce strode by, one of them tried to ask him for help, but he simply carried on toward his place on the bridge. Everyone would have a place soon. The protocol was clear. Everyone would have a job to do, and success would be contingent on their individual performances.