Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  They rounded a corner and resumed their search on the next street over. Hogg was frustrated at the stupidity of their hunt. It was way too much ground to search with only a dozen bodies. If these terrorists were as dangerous as Thorias said, why hadn’t he released more security officers to help with the search? Keeping hundreds of officers on guard duty in the aft didn’t make any sense at all. Hogg had long been smart enough to spot and suppress the instinct to suggest better solutions to his superiors, but this one was particularly challenging. What could they be thinking?

  §

  Sergei watched the man a few blocks away, standing perfectly still in the center of the street. Sergei’s hands flexed, fingers rolling and unrolling around his pistol. The guy had walked into the street a few minutes earlier and was now facing the barricade, perfectly still, his hands at his sides like a gunslinger. Sergei didn’t have to look to know that every other officer on the barricade was watching the same man.

  They had spent twelve hours on the barricade before being shifted off for a too brief rest. Now, midday on the day after the attacks, they were back on guard duty, an uneventful shift until now. The few people that had approached the barricade were different shades of annoyed, frustrated by the bizarrely complicated approval process for getting access to the aft. But all had been civil. At least until this maniac stepped into the center of the road. People with that kind of haircut tended to lack a bit in the civility department.

  “What do you think he’s doing?” one of the other officers asked.

  “Hard to say,” Sergei said. “Being incredibly crazy, I’d guess.”

  As if to underscore Sergei’s point, the man broke into a run, charging straight at the barricade, screaming like an animal. For thirty seconds they watched him run, his scream uninterrupted but for short gasps to catch his breath.

  “What the fuck is he doing?”

  “Whatever it is, I think he’s lost the element of surprise.”

  “What should we do?”

  “I don’t know. Sergei?”

  Sergei didn’t respond, only readying his pistol. When the man got within five meters of the barricade, Sergei fired. The man slumped to the ground, his scream finally silenced.

  “Nice shot.”

  “Yeah, nice shot, Sergei.”

  “Did you have to lead him much?”

  Lacking any better ideas, they left the man lying there, offering helpful comments on how he should best regain consciousness. Sergei finally got a good look at him, bare–chested, apparently completely unarmed, and, as suspected, wearing a haircut that was not a sane man’s. Finally, Sergei reported the incident to command, who sounded more bemused than concerned.

  Twenty minutes later the man stirred, moaning into the ground. Over the next few minutes, he rearranged his limbs under himself before eventually sitting up. He stared at the security officers watching him from the other side of their plastic fortifications, squinted, then put a hand over one eye. His head bobbed around unsteadily, and he blinked several times before finally saying a single word — “Rad.” Getting to his feet, he rocked back and forth on his heels a few times before retreating to the north. Collectively, all the officers at the barricade exhaled.

  Five minutes later, he pulled the same stunt again, charging at the baffled security officers as before, achieving an identical result. But before he could stir, he was joined by another lunatic, who charged behind him a few seconds later. As Sergei explained what was happening to an extremely confused dispatch, a group of three more men and a woman tried the same stunt, the last one screaming “Wheee!” as she was brought down.

  A crowd of onlookers had gathered down the street. Laughter and large gestures. They were egging each other on, and every few minutes another one joined the lunatic pigpile forming at the base of the barricade. Sergei’s frantic calls for reinforcements eventually yielded fruit, and more security officers streamed to the barricade to witness — and participate — in the spectacle.

  Within an hour, the Argos’ latest sport had established a codified set of rules, with points based on speed, distance, and style. Not long after that, someone elbowed Sergei, showing him a terminal and the current leader board. He turned away, wondering if the stunned expression he surely had on his face would become permanent.

  §

  “Well, what the fuck do you make of that?” Helot asked. One hand was pressed to his face, massaging his cheek, eye, and temple, and everything else exposed to the stupid he had just seen on the screens. Across the table, Thorias watched the scene unfold, arms crossed.

  “I think there are two ways to look at it,” Thorias finally said. “One, they’re not angry at us. It’s a game to them. That’s good news. They wouldn’t be assing around like that if they suspected what we were doing.” Helot nodded, seeing the logic in that. “The second interpretation,” Thorias continued, “is that this means they’re not scared of us.”

  “And that’s also a good thing.”

  Thorias’ head waggled back and forth. “I guess it is for now.”

  “Ohhhhhh, I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t like it at all when you get contemplative.”

  Thorias flicked his head at the image in front of them. “This is just games so far. And we’ll let them play. In a controlled fashion. Install extra padding, get some medics there, that kind of thing. Have a lot more officers on hand. For safety’s sake.” He smiled.

  “For safety’s sake,” Helot echoed.

  “But we have to plan for something a lot worse than this happening. We still haven’t found Kinsella,” Thorias said, giving Helot a knowing look. Helot’s toes curled, regretting his master villain moment yet again. “It’s only a matter of time before he starts telling people what we’re up to. And when he does, these little games will become a lot more serious. We should be ready for that.”

  “Ready for what, exactly?”

  Thorias reached down to clear the display, bringing up a map of the aft of the Argos in its place. “The worst case scenario I can see is a group of several hundred of them, armed with pistols.” Helot’s eyes widened. “Now, we don’t think they’re armed yet. But it won’t take long once they decide they want to. The schematics for the pistols will be floating around somewhere — I’m all but certain Kinsella has a set — and they certainly have the fabrication capacity. We could try to station guards around all the fabrication areas, but there are a lot of them, and that would leave us spread very thin in the aft. Hard to defend the core and Curts and his cutting teams then. So, yeah, I think they could put together pistols. And rounding up a few hundred maniacs is something I can imagine our mayor doing.” Thorias reached down on to the map and pulled up a custom layer. Colored lines and arrows appeared, thrusting and parrying back and forth across the 9th Avenue threshold.

  Helot held up a finger to interrupt Thorias while he composed his next words carefully. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” he finally asked, struggling to keep his voice steady. The words hung in the air as the rest of the control room went quiet.

  “Sir?”

  “You’re planning a ground war?” Helot’s hands shook as he gestured at the map. “You have, readily available, incredibly detailed plans on how to fight a ground war on this ship. Is this a hobby of yours?”

  Thorias stood up straighter. “I think it’s prudent to consider all the possibilities.”

  “All the possibilities? Really? All of them?” Helot’s voice started shaking. “This arrow here,” he said, pointing at the map. “What’s this arrow represent?”

  Thorias examined the map. “Twenty enemy troops circling behind one of our positions.”

  “Enemy troops! They’re not our enemy! They’re not even troops! What the fuck?”

  “Sir…”

  “No. No! Not gonna happen.” Helot pointed a finger at the security chief, the closest he had come to a threat in years. He was livid. His careful calculations had accounted for no loss of life during the separation itself. Certainly n
ot for an extended ground war. “You’re going to find Kinsella, we’re going to keep him quiet, and there’s not going to be any fucking arrows on any fucking maps. We’ll keep the doors closed and politely ask everyone to stay out of the aft.”

  Thorias exhaled through his nose. “Sir, those doors will not stay closed for long — the locks aren’t foolproof, and there are people over there capable of bypassing them. If that happens…”

  “If that happens, then you’ll have to deal with the couple drunk idiots who figured it out. Not twenty enemy troops. Shit.” He shook his head, still unable to believe the madman he had working for him. “Shit,” he added.

  Thorias stared at him for a few agonizingly slow–moving seconds. “Yes, sir,” he finally said and reached out to turn off the map. It was a gesture which should have caused Helot to relax, but he had a hard time doing that. He knew the map wasn’t going anywhere, that Thorias would simply keep his plans to himself from now on. A worrying thought. But there was no way he could replace the security chief now.

  “There is one other thing, Captain,” Thorias said, interrupting Helot’s train of thought. “When are we going to tell my officers about what we’re doing here? And their families?”

  Helot swallowed. They had plans for that, pamphlets and other reading material that would have been a lot easier to digest when read in the detached engine core, several thousand miles away from the rest of the ship, several thousand miles away from any chance of turning back. “They won’t need to know for now, will they?” he asked.

  Thorias stared back at him, not committing to anything. “No, I don’t see the advantage of telling them. Not yet.” He panned the map back towards the bow.

  “You were leaving officers behind, correct? Have they contacted you? How have you handled that?”

  “Hogg’s unit. I put them on to Stein and Redenbach. I figure if they find them, hey, great, and if they don’t, then at least it keeps them out of our hair for the next few days.”

  “How is he? This Hogg?” Helot asked. He was glad for anything to change the subject.

  Thorias stared back at him, expressionless. “Well, he’s not great.” Over the past few years, Thorias had been altering security officer assignments, moving the least desirable men off rotation where he could, and when he couldn’t, to the lone security outpost in the north of the ship, the Community Outreach and Policing Center. “Most of the ones we’re leaving are low achievers, as discussed. And everyone with weak Sheeping. Hogg’s one of those. We’d actually tried to get him off–rotation for this month, but there was an injury, and he got pulled back in.”

  Helot nodded. The “Sheep gene” was a useful misnomer, a label for a complicated set of genetic tweaks designed to make someone more docile. Not precisely mind control, it only twisted the personality to embed a sense of deference towards authority. A useful trait, at least from the perspective of authority. It was also, obviously, wildly illegal and had been secretly introduced into the population a couple of centuries earlier by one of Helot’s predecessors, slipped in during routine prenatal genetic screening. There was some unknown complication with the technique, however, and it had only been partially effective, even leading to a few surprising side effects. By the time Helot found out all of this, only a fraction of the population retained anything approaching full Sheeping. Unsurprisingly, a large fraction of that number found themselves serving in naval and security roles.

  “Otherwise, Hogg’s not that bad,” Thorias said. “I almost wish we could have kept him.”

  Of course you did, always handy to have another arrow for your map. Helot ran his hand through his hair, just a little surprised when no clumps came out with it.

  §

  Clicks and bumps and satisfied noises drifted over to Stein from somewhere to her left, the sounds of Bruce playing with his new toys. He had a lot to choose from; their hiding spot was well salted with firearms. And unlike nearly every other thing on the Argos, pistols were simple in design and incredibly durable. Whatever Bruce was cooing over was evidently still in working order, despite its advanced age.

  The first Argos–wide conflict had also been the nastiest. Whatever experience the participants of that conflict lacked in space–bound guerrilla warfare, they made up for in exuberance. What would later be called Argos War I occurred a little more than thirty years after the ship had departed. The cause of this conflict was predictable to the point of being droll: people were being jerks and not sharing. Specifically, a group of vocal media figures and protestors began shrieking that the government was hoarding higher quality food, resources, and living quarters for themselves and their families. The protesters even began calling themselves ‘The Hungry’ — although later historians would agree that label was a wild exaggeration. The government shared a similarly low opinion of the merit of these complaints and did little to address them. A famous political cartoon from the era depicted a large pig in a top hat — labeled Mayor Bradley — perched atop a balcony, depositing a large bowel movement on a group of peasants below. “Eat my shit!” the pig–mayor says.

  Eventually, a group of peasants, tired of eating shit, tried something a little more direct. The ship had a smaller security force at the time, with security officers and small security substations scattered throughout the ship. When a sizable group of civilians attacked these isolated stations simultaneously, the officers stationed there were quickly overwhelmed. And once armed with the security weapons available at the time — dual–setting and very lethal — the protestors weren’t shy about using them. By the time the remaining security forces could mobilize, the protestors had seized nearly three quarters of the ship. At that point, the rebelling faction nearly equaled the remaining security forces in numbers, and over the next few weeks the Argos saw a number of extraordinarily bloody, yet ultimately indecisive, engagements between the two sides.

  Thanks to either a brilliantly executed military maneuver or a piece of blind luck, the government forces defeated the Hungry and vigorously scrubbed the Argos’ gene–pool of their genetic legacy. Based on lessons learned during the war, the government soon adopted some considerably different security procedures. Almost all of the security substations throughout the ship were shuttered, with only a single community policing center left active in the bow, along with the main Security HQ in the aft. All officers were equipped with stun–capable weapons only, with the bulk of the lethal weapons destroyed, aside from a small cache kept on hand inside the main Security base.

  Similar disputes about resource distribution would flare up a couple more times in the history of the Argos, but never with the same ferocity. Using undercover agents and a network of informants, security kept a very tight lid on any vocally aggrieved groups that did form, and the few times violence did break out, it was met with immediate, overwhelming force. Any willing combatants fighting the security forces soon found that they weren’t willing for very long.

  The only other time the government of the Argos had been seriously threatened was when Stein was a young woman. Since the ship had launched, people had always chafed at the external approval needed before having a child — a necessary but uncomfortable fact of life on a generation ship. Two hundred years of bureaucratic growth has caused those restrictions to grow bloated, cumbersome, and blatantly unfair. When Stein was just finishing school, the fight against these restrictions was quietly taken up by a group calling themselves the Breeders. Their cause was a popular one, at least amongst the people who cared about things. More critically, the Breeders also had the support of two or three high ranking people within the ship’s government, who helped steer attention away from the fledgling group, aware of the efforts the security forces would use to disrupt them.

  Over time, the Breeders worked up the nerve to attack the government directly, using a stockpile of homemade weaponry they had been quietly fabricating. A group of the bravest, possibly dumbest, and certainly angriest of the Breeders staged a ridiculously daring raid on the security hea
dquarters, going after the weapons cache. They were able to penetrate right to the heart of the base without meeting any serious resistance, aided by the use of a secret maintenance tunnel discovered by a certain Breeder sympathizer called Laura Stein, working in her brand–new position in the maintenance department. There, the Breeder team secured a portion of the weapons cache, only to find themselves trapped by the security forces as they tried to retreat.

  Both sides had stories about what happened next, but only one side’s became accepted history. The way that story goes, the Breeder fighters began using some of their newly acquired lethal weaponry to fight their way out, killing several security officers, and thanks to their unfamiliarity with the properties of the weapons they were handling, at least some of themselves in the process.

  That revelation pretty much killed whatever public support there was left for the Breeders, and the handful who weren’t involved in the violence, along with those who had escaped from the battle at the security base, went into hiding. The witch–hunt that security enthusiastically conducted afterwards caught some of them, but at least a few managed to escape detection, including three of Stein’s best friends. But with their organization in pieces, the code words and safe houses and weapon caches they had used were mothballed and left dormant.