But I knew. Captain Swift must have stolen a Medical uniform to frame Doc when he attacked Neptune. He’d discarded it in the elevator. He hadn’t known I was in the repair hatch at the time.
There was no way to unknow what I’d figured out.
“You sent Neptune to repair the exterior of the ship,” I said slowly.
Captain Swift stopped a few feet in front of me. “You know about the mission?”
“You came here to the uniform ward to talk to Neptune about it. I overheard your conversation.”
“Then you know what Neptune knows.”
He said it slowly. Too slowly. My instinct was to answer quickly, in the manner expected of a subordinate officer in private conference with the captain. But he wasn’t looking for a yes or a no. He was reading me to see how much I knew.
If I knew he killed the second navigation officer, leaked CO into engineering, and invented a fake mission designed to send Neptune to his death.
Yes, I knew. I didn’t know why he’d done any of it, but in that moment, I was sure he was behind everything.
“You’re a criminal. You sabotaged the ship and risked the lives of everybody on board. What I don’t know is why. Maybe why doesn’t matter.” I stepped backward to put space between us.
“You know all that? I’m impressed. Here I thought approving the faked application of a low-income Plunian would be a safe move. Far safer than letting Neptune’s protégé on the ship. She would never have accepted that her brother’s death was an accident.”
“Her brother?”
“Dakkar Teron, the second navigation officer.”
My mind raced. I’d hacked my credentials into the computer on top of Daila’s credentials. The position of uniform lieutenant was minor enough that I’d assumed approval would be conducted by automated computer systems, or that someone would click a box and upload my files to the crew manifests. I hadn’t expected my files to be reviewed by the captain himself.
“I can tell from your expression you’re surprised. Did you think I was going to let a wild card onto my ship and potentially ruin my plans?”
“What do you need with a Moon Unit?”
“I don’t need the ship. I need the passengers on the ship. The space pirates waiting for me at the destination point on Ganymede are looking for slaves. Worker bees. They’re willing to pay top dollar.”
“You’re selling the passengers and the crew into slavery to space pirates?”
“Not the crew,” he said. “They’ll die in an unfortunate explosion shortly after the passengers disembark.” He picked up one of the loose canisters of oxygen that had rolled across the floor. “These Moon Units. They sure are unlucky.”
As we spoke, he’d crept toward me and I’d crept back. There was only so much room left in the uniform ward, and once my back was up against a wall, I’d have nowhere to go. I took another backward step past the console. My eyes cut to the plastic bubble over the button.
“Funny thing, you reporting a Code Blue on your first day,” Captain Swift said. “Your CV didn’t indicate you had any knowledge of our BOP. I couldn’t take the risk of you being allowed to act on your own a second time.” He knocked on the plastic bubble covering the red button. “Welded into place by Yeoman D’Nar. Following instructions to keep you from manufacturing reports of any other crimes.”
“The crime I reported was real.”
“Yes. But what are the odds that there would be two emergencies coming from the uniform ward? Yeoman D’Nar already thinks you’re a nuisance. She might not even be all that upset when the chip in your head malfunctions and kills you.”
The chip in my head. There was no chip in my head. I knew it. Neptune knew it. Pika knew it. But nobody else knew it.
Captain Swift thought he could take me out by short-circuiting a non-existent chip. He raised his space gun and spun one of the knobs on the top, and then pointed it at my temperature-adjusting lounging uniform that I’d discarded in a pile on the floor when I’d changed. He fired. A white beam shot out from the gun, and the garment glowed like it had been plugged into a power socket. Seconds later, the supposedly indestructible fabric was a mound of hardened mass, melted into a useless paperweight.
There might not be a chip in the back of my head, but I wasn’t out of the woods yet.
I needed a weapon. I had nothing but a dogeared BOP. Neptune’s gun sat on the console by the alarm button I couldn’t activate. The iron was on the pressing board on the other side of the ship. Captain Swift had kicked the loose canisters of oxygen behind him, where they’d rolled up against the wall. It was him, me, and a pile of newly pressed and folded uniforms.
He raised his gun. “Maybe I should include you with my drop off to the pirates. Like a bonus. I bet a part-Plunian, part-earthling slave would earn me a little something extra.” His eyes trailed down from my face to my torso, lingering in a way that told me exactly what kind of extra he hoped to get.
My stomach turned. I’d backed up so far that there was no place left to go. The bench with the folded uniforms jutted into the back of my legs. But somewhere in my brain, risk assessment told me the captain wasn’t going to use the gun on me. Not if he expected to turn me over to the space pirates. I’d be of more value to him—and them—alive than dead.
“It’s over, Lt. Stryker. Look on the bright side. You probably have a long, exciting life ahead of you. That’s what you wanted when you left your planet behind, right?”
Whatever I’d wanted when I left Plunia was gone. Dreams, hopes, desires, goals. Destroyed by one man, one ship, one experience. Which was worse: that the man who’d granted my dreams was corrupt to the core, or that he’d only granted them because he’d expected nothing of me?
Anger built up inside me, ten times stronger than what I’d felt before attacking the Martians in the hallway. My skin turned neon purple. Captain Swift’s eyes widened. I dropped the BOP and lunged. The attack took him by surprise and we fell. I got on my hands and knees and crawled toward the exit. He grabbed my ankles and yanked me backward. I clawed at the ground and kicked at him.
“You killed my mother!” I cried.
He wrapped his arms around my legs, restricting my movement. “You were supposed to be a cipher,” he said between panting breaths. “A zero. A farmer’s daughter with a dad in jail. Couldn’t even pass the physical requirements to be on this ship.” He bound my legs with a pair of crew trousers. “Why’d you try so hard, Stryker? Nobody cares. Especially now. Not your mother—she’s dead. I made sure the pirates saw to that when they destroyed Plunia. And not anybody else who lived on your pathetic planet, unless that explosion blew them so far into the atmosphere that they caught up with the ship. Nobody will miss you when you’re gone.”
I spread my arms wide, grasping for a weapon. My fingers connected with my bubble helmet. I grabbed it in my right hand and rolled myself over, swinging it toward Captain Swift’s head as hard as I could.
The fiberglass bubble connected with his skull. His eyes rolled up into his head and he fell to the side, his upper body draped across my legs. I was pinned.
His gun had fallen from his fingers. I twisted and strained to reach it. I could end this. Now. I was less than an inch away from the gun when the doors opened and Vaan entered. His foot connected with the gun and knocked it close enough to grab.
My hand wrapped around the grip and I aimed at the captain.
“Don’t do it, Syl,” Vaan said. “Don’t throw away your future. If you shoot him, I can’t look the other way.”
“He’s a criminal. He killed one crew member and poisoned two others. He had pirates destroy Plunia. He needs to die.”
“That’s not your decision,” Vaan said. “Let Federation Council decide his fate.”
I kept the gun trained on Captain Swift. Vaan secured the captain’s wrists behind his back with council cuffs and shifted his body off my legs.
“Give me the gun,” Vaan said. He held out his hand, palm side up.
&nbs
p; I looked at Captain Swift, slumped on the ground, unconscious from my strike to his head. I looked up at Vaan’s face, filled with forgiveness for a crime I hadn’t committed.
The doors opened again, and this time Neptune came in. His shirt was torn away from his chest and a makeshift bandage was on his shoulder. Blood had seeped into it. He looked at me, and I saw in his expression everything I felt.
Neptune didn’t have a title. He didn’t have security clearance. He belonged on this ship about as much as I did. But he was here to do a job, just like me. And the reality of that job was nothing like he’d expected.
He aimed his gun at the captain. Fired. Once. Twice. The captain’s body flinched with the first impact but not the second.
Captain Swift was dead.
Vaan spoke. “I have to report your actions.”
“Do your job. I just did mine.” Neptune handed the gun to Vaan. “Stryker is innocent of any accusations. Get her to Medi-bay.” He left without looking back.
31: Post Mortem
Moon Unit 5 arrived at Ganymede after all.
No damage had been sustained to the ship under the Captain’s crooked direction, but the same couldn’t be said for the crew. Dakkar Teron, the second navigation officer and brother of the original uniform lieutenant, had been murdered. Two members of the engineering crew had been poisoned with noxious gas. And Neptune was still recovering from the stab wound the captain inflicted when Neptune left the repair chamber to investigate a hunch that something wasn’t right. Doc said Neptune would recover in time. Despite the way he grumbled about it, I knew he’d been just as thankful as the rest of us for the role Neptune played in protecting the ship and its passengers.
That included me. Sure, I’d figured out something wasn’t right when I looked out the porthole of the repair chamber and saw the speed at which we were moving. But Neptune had figured it out before then. He’d placed the outer seal of the repair chamber on lockdown, protected by his private log-in credentials. Even if I’d tried to open the chamber myself when I saw he was gone, I wouldn’t have been able to. He’d made sure I wouldn’t die before he went after the person who’d stabbed him and left him in the cell to die.
It was hard to be mad at him after that, but I managed. Mostly because I’d figured something else out too.
I stood by the ship’s exit, saying goodbye to passengers heading out for a day of sightseeing. Since Plunia was now gone, Moon Unit Corporation had arranged for a space taxi to transport me, and all other crew members who had lost their homes thanks to the space pirates, from Ganymede to temporary housing on Federation Council property.
I was surprised by the number of people on the ship who said goodbye to me by name. Even Yeoman D’Nar had a few kind words, despite my accusations of murder based on the fake fingernail fragment I’d found in the uniform closet. It turned out D’Nar and Dakkar Teron, the second navigational officer, had tussled in the uniform ward before the ship departed, just not the sort of tussling I’d assumed. Her attitude problem was simply a defense mechanism to hide the fact that her lover had been found dead. When she realized she’d lost a fingernail, she feared incrimination.
I waited at the exit for Neptune. We hadn’t spoken since the night he’d killed the captain. I didn’t know if he thought I was a hero or a hindrance. I didn’t know if he would have shot the captain if not for me.
He was among the last crew members to exit the ship. “Stryker,” he said.
“Neptune.”
He stood next to me with a black duffel bag over his non-injured shoulder. He hooked his thumb under the strap and hitched the bag up. “Take care.”
“That’s it? ‘take care?’ We never talked about what happened.”
“Security crew doesn’t talk about missions.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll never get a chance to work another cruise ship like this one. On paper, the only thing I’m qualified to do is farm ice, and now that Plunia is gone, the only ice farms are on Mars. I don’t want to live on Mars.”
“You got a place to stay?”
“That’s not the point.”
“I know.” He looked off in the distance, past a row of space taxis. “Do you know why I took this job?”
“The chance to show off your sparkling personality?”
He smiled. “I made a mistake. Back when I had an opportunity to teach at the space academy. I made a mistake and it cost me my credentials, my title, and my reputation. I cut myself off from everybody I knew. A friend I’d lost touch with contacted me about this job. We were at the academy together. It wasn’t what I would have chosen if I’d had a choice. I was a soldier. Moon Unit Cruise Ship Security?” He shook his head to show how he felt about the choice. “Gotta set aside a lot of ego to go from protecting federation ships to babysitting a vacation vessel.”
“You wanted a paycheck.”
“I wanted to feel important again.” Neptune looked away from the crowds and directly at me. “Thaddeus Swift was that friend.”
There was no quick retort for that. I’d been so busy thinking about the losses I’d experienced while on Moon Unit 5 that I hadn’t considered how Neptune’s actions affected himself. He’d shot and killed the man who had pulled him out of his self-imposed exile. We had both made sacrifices. We would forever be changed by what happened. I’d dealt with loss when my dad had been arrested. I suspected this wasn’t a first for Neptune either.
“Stryker, take it from me. It’s not easy to lose the life you know. It’s tempting to self-destruct. Some people withdraw. Others seek familiarity.” Neptune’s honesty was both surprising and welcome, but he wasn’t getting off that easily.
“There never was a problem with the ship’s hull, was there?”
“Captain Swift told me Engineering reported a crack in the exterior to him prior to departure. I ran a pre-flight inspection and didn’t see any signs of maintenance or repair. Raised a red flag. I told him the problem was fixed, but I was on alert.”
“You used me,” I said. He raised one eyebrow into a sharp peak. “You suspected something was wrong as far back as the day you arrested me for being on the ship. You suspected Captain Swift and you used me as bait to get your proof.”
“It’s security’s job to take risks to protect everybody else. You should know that. You attended the space academy.”
“My dad got arrested and I had to drop out to help my mom on the ice farm. I thought you knew all that.”
“My tenure at the academy ended before your dad was arrested. I assumed you graduated like your CV said.”
I’d said a lot of stuff to Neptune since boarding the ship. I’d lobbied accusations at him. Insults. Sarcasm. Lies. And after all that, after having lived through what I had, knowing how unclear my future was, I felt I had little to lose from plain old candor.
“After I returned to Plunia, I hacked into the academy computer and downloaded the curriculum. I bought class lessons and used materials and taught myself as best as I could. If you checked up on me, you would have known my CV was bogus.”
“Your credentials were bogus, but your knowledge was real. Nobody would deny that.” We both turned to watch the crew of Martians deboard the ship. “Not even them.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
Neptune raised his eyebrow again.
“What happened at the academy to make you leave?”
“I got involved with a student.” He was silent for a beat. “Her name was Daila Teron.”
Oh.
“You saw her name on the crew manifest. You expected her to be on the ship instead of me. Is that why you came to the uniform ward before my Code Blue was acknowledged?”
He nodded. “I wanted to establish some guidelines so there wouldn’t be any conflicts of interest on the moon trek.”
Neither one of us mentioned how poorly that had turned out for him.
I looked down at my magenta uniform. It was the same one I’d worn when I’d arrived. Over the past six days, it had
been torn apart and put back together. It was the uniform equivalent to my life. And the longer Neptune let my statement go unanswered, the more I got the picture. “You knew from the first day you saw me on the ship that I didn’t belong.”
“Your presence on the ship raised some questions, yes.”
I smiled to myself. “Is she coming to pick you up?”
“No. Daila and I were short-lived.”
“But your password—”
“The last time I got involved with a subordinate, it cost me my job and my reputation. Using her name as a password was a reminder not to let that happen again.”
“Is that a habit of yours? Getting involved with subordinates?”
“No.”
The word hung in the air. With it came questions, answers, and unexpected emotions. Whatever I wanted to say was silenced by the sight of Vaan waving at me from the end of the docking station.
While Vaan and Neptune had maintained cordiality for the duration of the moon trek, there’d been no love lost between them. Vaan had initiated proceedings to strip Neptune of his rank and title. Nobody had told Vaan that Neptune had lost his credentials long before the moon trek had started. Including me. When the council came back with the ruling that no action would be taken against Neptune, Vaan’s reputation took a hit. Put simply: the two men would never be buddies.
Pika skipped out from the ship. She held a large purple oxygen pop in one hand, and traces of the violet hue had smeared around the outside of her mouth in a ring. She skidded to a halt when she saw me talking to Neptune and tried to hide the oxygen pop behind her back. “Am I in trouble?” she asked Neptune.
“No. Just”—Neptune looked slightly embarrassed—“wait for me over there.”
“Okay,” She looked guilty for a moment, and then gave me one of her fifty-tooth smiles. “I’m glad you didn’t die!” She hugged me, and then, in a flash, was at the end of the platform with the other departing passengers.
“What’s going to happen to Pika?” I asked.
“She’ll be fine.”
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