by Ron Collins
“Thank you, sir.”
“In fact,” Torrance said. “If you feel you’re up to it, I would like to give you authority to complete the shakedown yourself. I’ll review your work, of course. And I’ll be at your call if you need me. But your paperwork tells me your work is excellent, and you’ve already proven to me that you know what you’re doing. I trust you’ll do a great job.”
Her face flushed with the compliment. “Thank you, sir. You can count on me.”
Torrance contained a grin. “Good. I’ll make the authorization.”
Marin smiled.
“In the meantime—” He looked at the clock again. “—how about I get the system to send us some lunch, and you can tell me how you intend to complete the shakedown?”
Marin hesitated. “Well, uh. I’ve already eaten.”
“Oh.”
“And if I’m going to finish the shakedown anytime soon, I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“I understand completely.” Torrance forced a smile. He always enjoyed how people’s assessment of work changed when they were responsible for it. “I still want to see your plan, though.”
“I can get it to you by 1400.”
“That would be fine,” he said.
Marin smoothed invisible wrinkles on the sides of her pants legs. “Thank you, sir.”
The door shut behind her.
“Can I get you anything from the mess, sir?” Abke asked again.
“A sandwich, please. Egg salad with lettuce,” he replied. “And something on the side to snack on.”
“It will be here in a moment, sir.”
Torrance sighed, and pulled up the system schedule. He had a problem to solve, with a brand-new crew and a critical team member who didn’t like him. Launch was less than twenty-four hours away. Even after delegating the shakedown, this was going to take some doing.
CHAPTER 8
Atropos, Eta Cassiopeia System
Local Date: Studna 25, 9
Local Time: 1415
The low rumble of an approaching skimmer came from the distance.
Todias Nimchura stood and wiped sweat from his brow. He couldn’t help but look at it as it drew near.
It was an old hovercraft, caked with layers of dust and dirt that would probably never fully come off without an acidic power wash. Its engines were probably out of date, too—pretty much like everything here. It would be a sluggish piece of shit to handle. Barely able to turn, and probably so slow it couldn’t outrun half the animals on the planet. But it flew.
Just the thought of controlling it made his hands itch.
It was only Nimchura’s God-given skills with a joystick that got him into Interstellar Command to begin with.
The skimmer drew to a stop maybe fifty meters away.
The pilot sat still as the passenger got out and discussed something with the shift leader. They referenced a datapad, then the shift leader pointed to Nimchura. The passenger looked his way, then nodded. The judgmental expressions on their faces made the hair on the back of his neck do cartwheels, and he was suddenly hyperaware of the grit he was grinding between his teeth. For a moment he considered walking over to them. He saw himself grabbing the pilot and throwing him out of the cockpit, felt the power of cramming the engine controller to get the thing spun up, and the pure joy of wrenching the skimmer away.
In that moment, Nimchura actually felt the ground fade, and the sense of gravity shift as the skimmer would slide away. He heard the whine of the power system, felt the shake of the seat below him.
Then he was back standing in the heat of the day, watching as his shift leader and the passenger confirmed something else, then watching the new arrival get back into the skimmer, listening as the engine rumbled to life again and the craft returned to wherever it originated from.
The shift leader glanced his way, and pointed at the flooring Nimchura had been working on.
“That’s not gonna get done by itself, Flyboy,” she called at him.
He pressed his lips together, then spit on the ground.
Asshole that the shift leader was, Flyboy had become her favorite name for him once she had come to realize what the idea of flying meant to him.
He glanced at the skimmer as it disappeared into a cloud of brown dust.
Strange, Nimchura thought.
He had never been the focus of a visit before.
He returned to his pour.
* * *
It was nearly dark when Nimchura stepped into his hut and slammed the door closed. The frame was out of alignment again. He had to twist it around to get everything to fit together. When he held it just right, the thing closed with a grating sound of wood on concrete that just served to piss him off even more. That’s how it was here. Always something wrong. Always something to fix.
“You’re later than usual,” Hadri said, sitting on the mattress they had pushed up against the far wall. A personal reader glowed on her lap. She looked at him through dark eyes that were made darker by the hut’s lack of reasonable lighting.
“Sorry,” he said. “I think they moved the schedule up.”
They had been together three years now. She had been good for him. It was a relationship Nimchura had fought, but Hadri, he had learned over time, was a woman who knew how to get what she wanted.
Nimchura declined her advances at first because, even though U3’s leadership had set him free a year before, he was still busy playing the part of wronged captive. His behavior during two years of lockup had proven he wasn’t particularly aligned to the UG, but he wasn’t aggressive or obnoxious, and it became more of a pain in the ass to take care of him than let him go, so he was a free man, now. As free as anyone else, anyway.
Later he rebuffed Hadri because he thought she was just looking for something unusual and he didn’t want to be anyone’s pet. Hadri Kamila was an academic in the ranks of free citizens, a woman who worked in anthropology and social structures. He assumed she wanted him so she could dangle him in front of her friends as much as anything else. Despite the fact that he found her to be attractive, he had wanted to be alone. So, it had taken time.
Thank the powers she was also persistent.
Of course, it turned out that Hadri had wanted him as much for the aura of forbidden fruit that surrounded him in those early days as anything else. Her job may have been about social norms, but her interests ran toward the unique and unusual, in more ways than one. There were few people more unique or unusual back then than Todias Nimchura, a shot-down UG pilot from Tupelo, Mississippi. In the end, it had worked, though. He liked her independence, she liked cracking his personality—or at least the fact that he hid it so well.
Nimchura sat next to her and put his head back against the wall. Hadri rubbed his arm.
Their hut was tiny but not unusual for the city, five meters to a side, with a concrete floor he had been given permission to pour himself, a permission he understood even then was given more as a way to prove Universe Three was willing to play ball than for any particular fairness. They framed the walls with wood from trees that grew in the forest a half mile away. Gaps in the cracks were filled with a gummy pitch that often needed replacement. The roof was a mix of water-retaining bark he had peeled from trees, and thatched reeds he had pulled from downstream on the lake and riverbed that flowed out beyond the city. The two of them decorated it with a rotating array of art and other knickknacks that struck their fancy. Today, he saw Hadri had brought in a tangled branch of the white-barked tree that grew so prevalently in the area.
It was interesting, he thought. Twisted in a hundred different directions. Fitting for her. He understood why she liked it.
“I waited to cook,” she said, not mentioning the fact that it was his turn.
“That’s good.”
“Long day, I guess.”
The rough surface of the wall rubbed against his head as he nodded. He pressed his skull harder into the wall to quell a small headache. His shoulders and arms were numb wit
h fatigue. The specter of the skimmer weighed on him. He wanted to fly. It was all he could think of—that sense of being on or in a piece of machinery that was gliding on thin air, or rolling out in deep space. He wanted to feel the thrust of engines, hear the sounds of a plane or a jumper as it made its flight. For a minute he wanted to talk about it, but he looked at Hadri and knew she couldn’t understand.
This, he thought, was the thing he missed the most about the service—missed the most about Deuce Jarboe, his wing leader who had died during the attack UG made on the city.
“Let me get to cooking, then.”
Hadri set the reader aside, and rolled to her knees before taking one lurching step toward the open pit in the far corner. She pulled herself up on a small stool as she plugged a cord in that led to the ventilation fan they had mounted on the wall above the recess. The fan kicked on with a grating hum, and ensured errant smoke was evacuated. She lit a fire with a gas wand, turned up the wick, and put a pair of packets on the grate that lay above the flames. The packets were a mix of meat and vegetables, wrapped in a sheath of what was essentially a ground corn tortilla shell. She also put a kettle of pasta and water on the grate.
The aroma of cooking meat and boiling noodles filled the room.
Nimchura closed his eyes and kept his head tilted back.
It felt like rain might come this evening. It had rained earlier in the day, and the thatch still smelled damp.
Hadri returned, planting a kiss on Nimchura’s lips.
“How did your day go?” Nimchura said, not opening his eyes.
“It was good,” she replied.
A pounding came at the door.
“Todias Nimchura?” a voice called.
Hadri’s expression clouded.
“What is it?” Nimchura yelled, raising to one knee.
“Please open the door, sir.”
He glanced around the hut, suddenly feeling its lack of size with more intensity than he had before. He stood, grabbed another stool by one leg, and, holding it as a weapon, opened the door.
By the light of their fire, he saw it was a U3 security officer. A young man with a detachment of three more support staff behind him.
“What is it?”
“I need you to come with me, sir.”
“We’re just getting ready to eat.”
Nimchura relaxed his arm with the stool, but did not drop it.
“I’m sure the director will ensure you get a meal, sir.”
“The director?”
Nimchura frowned. What could Casmir Francis want with him? In the distance of his mind he recalled the passenger of the skimmer and the way his shift boss looked at him as she pointed Nimchura’s way.
“Is this about the skimmer?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. I just need you to come with me.”
Nimchura looked at Hadri.
She shrugged. “Go,” she said.
“All right.”
He went to put the stool down, but the memory of the work site and the skimmer came over him like a wave of heat. He felt his shift leader point at him, and the man turn to gaze at him with such…contempt. In that moment the hair on his neck rose again, and he felt…caged—remembering the skimmer, and feeling the ground pressing up through his feet.
He left his body then.
Or at least that’s how he would remember it.
He straightened himself, still holding the stool by one awkward leg, still wearing his work clothes. “Can I clean up?” he said.
“No, sir. My orders are to bring you directly.”
“I see,” Nimchura replied.
And he swung the stool, feeling the weight of the wood turn in his hand, catching the stooge in the face and the shoulder with the looping arc of the blow. The man fell with a grunt. Nimchura was already spinning on one leg and grabbing the stool by two legs to bring it crashing down on a second guard.
The smell of blood came to him.
It felt good.
Familiar in an odd way.
He thought of flying. Slicing through clouds and into open air, racing through a field of debris, turning the spacecraft and heading in a dive straight toward ground that was rushing up at him with blinding speed.
Which is where he found himself.
On the dry dirt outside the hut, cheek digging into the grit and the fire of something ringing at the top of his head, something too sharp to be identified at first, but was going to grow into a wave of red hot pain right about…now.
He tried to raise up, but the last thing he saw was the boot of the third guard swinging toward his face.
Then it got dark.
CHAPTER 9
UGIS Orion
Local Date: January 25, 2215
Local Time: 0115
Torrance sat slouched in a chair beside the briefing podium. The rest of the systems team was scattered about Orion’s auditorium room, filling about a quarter of its fifty seats. The air was stuffy and tense. It reminded him a lot of a night spent on Everguard several years back.
“I don’t know what else to do,” Skiles said, leaning back in his padded seat and staring at the ceiling. After an eighteen-hour shift, Skiles looked as tired as Torrance felt. His uniform jacket was unzipped to the sternum, his eyes were faded and bleary, and his longish hair was frayed from having had a hand run through it far too many times. A light shadow of stubble was forming on his chin. “We’ve been through every piece of code in the optical sensor, and hand-checked every pattern the recognition system is based on,” he said.
“There’s nothing there, Commander,” Ramista added from the seat beside Skiles.
The two were an item, Torrance realized that now. They hadn’t told anyone, yet, but he could see it in the way they worked together, the way their eyes locked at certain moments and how they gave each other a comfortable space to work in.
“What’s the latest on the optics package?” Torrance asked.
Kluvac replied from the front row. “It’s clean, sir. We swapped out all three subassemblies, and they tested fine.”
“Weapons?”
All heads turned to Commander Yuan, who sat calmly by herself on the left side of the auditorium.
“The weapons systems all test fine.”
“Are you certain?”
Yuan toggled a controller and pointed the infrared port to the holo projector. “I can walk you through the checkout procedure if you would like, sir.” She held her finger over the button that would transfer data to the projector, and stared at him with ice-cold intensity. Her hair and makeup were still perfectly in place despite the hour. Her movements were still precise.
Torrance fought to control himself. He didn’t need this.
“No, Commander,” he said. “Thank you, anyway. No reason to drag the team through it at this time of the morning. I’ll look at your procedures later.”
He scanned the auditorium. The team’s eyes all shifted under his gaze, glancing sideways or down at their feet. He was Torrance Black, hero. Or maybe he was just Torrance Black, their latest command flunky. Regardless, they were worried, and they didn’t know how to relate to him. Worse—they were watching him, judging him, seeing how he handled himself, and trying to assess who he was. He realized then how valuable Karl Malloy’s sense of humor had been.
Just the thought gave him an angry chill.
Torrance stood and strolled across the stage, his chin in his hand. He spoke in a train of thought as he walked. “Well,” he said. “That’s it, then. The captain has made it clear he intends to launch at 0800 regardless of whether this system is working or not.”
He paused and looked at Skiles.
“Do you think I have a chance at the record for the shortest command of all time?”
Skiles, caught off guard, squirmed in his chair.
Ramista grinned, though, and a few others chuckled. The rest laughed when Torrance followed with his best try at mimicking Malloy’s boyish grin while giving what he hoped was a comic shrug.
A familiar voice came from the back of the room.
“What if you mask it, sir?”
Torrance looked up to see Thomas Kitchell at the top of the auditorium’s stairway.
The young man was standing straight, though it was clear his posture was coming at a cost. He wore an Academy blue shirt over his dark pants, and a dark jacket over the shirt. The sleeve that peeked from under the coat carried the Everguard patch and a set of three citations.
“Thomas,” Torrance said, suddenly unable to utter a different word.
Kitchell came down the stairs, holding onto the rail with each step. “I said, what if you mask it?”
“What do you mean?” Skiles said.
Kitchell got to the bottom of the stairs and steadied himself.
“I’ve seen all the specs and some of the failure reports. The system is interpreting hand and arm adductions as an aggressive maneuver, and somehow triggering the firing command, right? So, if we can’t figure out what’s wrong, maybe the best thing would be just to remove that trigger altogether. If nothing else, you’ve still got a ninety-five percent system, which is better than the nothing you’ll have if you shut it all down.”
The auditorium was silent as the idea settled in.
“It was just a thought,” Kitchell murmured.
“And it was a good one,” Torrance said. “Just what we needed.”
“Who is this?” Yuan said. She was sitting forward now.
Torrance went to the young man and took his hand. Kitchell’s grip was firm and warm. He put his arm around the boy, who wasn’t so much a boy anymore, and clasped him into a tight hug. When they parted, Torrance took him in from close up, hands on both shoulders, seeing Kitchell’s tired face and his worn posture but also feeling the power of the kid’s presence. Torrance was torn by the need to laugh and cry at the same time.