Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  “Sergeant Hogg,” the mayor began — the first time anyone outside of his original team had mentioned his rank. “Henry here was the architect of last night’s little…what are we calling it again? Let’s say, ‘Sloppy Business.’ ” Hogg nodded once; that fit quite well. “Based on the results of Henry’s ‘Sloppy Business’…,” the mayor spared a tired glance for his right hand man, “…he seems to think that this war isn’t winnable.” Kinsella looked pointedly at Hogg. “Tell me what you think about that.”

  Hogg chose his words carefully. “He’s not far off. We basically suck at this. But I don’t think it’s hopeless. The way they’re digging in, there’s good reason to think Helot is going to take a long time to try to detach again. I think we have time. And with time, we might be able to do something.”

  “That doesn’t sound very hopeless. Bletmann?” Kinsella said.

  “With what army?” Bletmann moaned.

  “With the troops we’ve been recruiting and training,” Hogg said. “You should know about them. I’ve seen you there.”

  Bletmann looked up, casting a woeful look at Hogg. “They’re not going to stay. They won’t risk their lives for us anymore. Not after last night.”

  “I don’t know about that, Henry,” Kinsella said, a thin smile on his face. “Something about having the lights turned out like that,” Kinsella continued. “That might wake a few people up. Is that irony? Shit, I think that’s irony, isn’t it? We can use that.” Kinsella pounded his fist into his open palm. “I would not be surprised if the news feeds get pretty upset about this. And if some agitators maybe spend the next few days riling people up, why, I bet our recruitment numbers will be just fine.” Kinsella smiled; he clearly hadn’t been completely idle. “Sergeant Hogg, you’ve been basically running the entire training program, correct?”

  “I’ve had a lot of help from my officers.” He swallowed. “And some help from some of your people of course. Which has been very…helpful.”

  “Yes, of course.” Kinsella’s eyes flicked over to Bletmann again. “I’m asking if you could continue doing that without Henry’s assistance.”

  “Yes, sir, I think I could.”

  “Good. I’m telling you to do that.” Kinsella looked at Hogg for some sign of acknowledgment, seeming to be satisfied with Hogg’s single nod. “In addition, do you have any thoughts on how we should best proceed, strategically?”

  “Strategically,” Hogg repeated. He wondered for a moment what kind of strategy was appropriate for an army of angry morons and whether ‘strategy’ was even the right word to be working with. “That will depend on what your long–term goal is, I suppose,” he said, playing it safe.

  “Good. Very good!” Kinsella said. He clapped his hands together three times. “Exactly the kind of question Henry never asked.” He glared once again at his assistant, now quietly sobbing in the corner. “Our long–term goal is either killing Helot or moving his ass out of that end of the ship. Simple enough?”

  Hogg bit his tongue. “Yes, sir. In that case, yes, I do have a couple ideas how to proceed. I think we could…”

  “I don’t need to hear them,” Kinsella interrupted him. “I just need to know you have them. Thoughts are good. Need more of them around here, I’m thinking.” Kinsella rubbed his hands together. “Because you’re in charge of this whole shitshow now. I hope you’re up to it. The job’s had some turnover issues.”

  “So I see.”

  The mayor clapped his hands together again. “Great! It’s a deal.” He licked his lips. “Henry? Thanks for your services. You are of course still welcome to serve in your former role. I could use some coffee in fact. Please take your time getting it.” His gaze hardened. Bletmann meekly got up and left the bedroom.

  Hogg watched him go, then turned back to face the mayor. “He meant well. Just a little out of his depth.”

  “One of his jobs is knowing what his depth is.”

  Kinsella flipped the covers off of him and got out of bed. He walked over to the window, beckoning Hogg to join him. From there he could see down to the southern end of the garden well. Hogg bit his lip. No wonder the mayor was pissed; he must have seen every part of the debacle.

  Kinsella looked over his shoulder for a moment, checking that the room was still empty. “What do you know about Laura Stein and Bruce Redenbach?” he asked.

  Hogg blinked, surprised by the sudden change in direction the conversation had taken. “I arrested the Stein woman. The other one shot almost everyone else in my squad. Nice people. Why?”

  Kinsella nodded. “You remember that thing the other night with the van?”

  Hogg nodded. A day after the riot, a couple of maniacs had plowed a van through the back of one of the barricades. “What about it?” he asked. Kinsella smiled. “It was them?” Hogg shook his head. “Of course it was them.”

  “It was,” Kinsella confirmed. “The Stein woman’s hurt, though.”

  Hogg opened his mouth, about to say ‘Good’ before catching himself. Abrasive though she might have been, she had also apparently been right.

  “I ask,” Kinsella began, leaning against the window sill and peering down the well, “because Laura Stein is supposedly the one who said I was behind this whole plot. ‘Under interrogation,’ the feeds said.”

  Hogg swallowed. “That interrogation never happened. I think Thorias just made it up.” Hogg related the story of his capture of Stein, her tale, and the phony report of an interrogation that Thorias released soon after. “I guess it’s one of the reasons I didn’t try to arrest you too hard.”

  A far–off look crossed the mayor’s face. “She said she’d figured this out on her own?” he asked.

  “She seemed to know more about it than anyone else. Knew about it before your, uh, speech.”

  “Hmmmmm,” the mayor said. Hogg winced. First, he locked her up for something she didn’t do, and now he might have accidentally sent the mayor after her. That woman is going to hate me.

  Kinsella shifted gears again. Gesturing down the well, he asked “So, what’s your plan?”

  Hogg was getting better at reading the mayor’s shifts. “Simple. We stop sending our guys to get blown away.”

  “But we’d gotten so good at that. Seems a shame to ignore our only strength.”

  “I don’t think we can ignore it completely,” Hogg said. He looked down to the fortified semi–circle of security officers jutting out into the garden well. From up here, Kinsella was still far enough away to avoid seeing the human costs. No one had been killed yet, but that was coming. And it was now Hogg’s job to make it happen.

  “We just have to wait until we have a lot more to throw away,” he said.

  §

  Stein brought her fist down hard on the end of the spork, propelling a lump of broccoli upwards. The overcooked green spun lazily through the air, ricocheted off a light fixture, fell back down to the cafeteria table, bounced twice, then rolled off the table to the floor. “Five for twenty–three,” she said quietly, setting up another. One more night in the hospital so her rattled skull could stay under observation. Her friends, evidently satisfied she wasn’t imminently about to perish, had left her to her own devices. Devices which had led her to the cafeteria, where she had found a new way to entertain herself.

  “You’re not very good at that, are you?” someone said behind her. She turned to see a doctor, one she hadn’t met before, though he did look familiar. And oily.

  “Mr. Mayor,” she said, recognizing him through his disguise, which on closer inspection, appeared to consist of little more than a lab coat and costume stethoscope. “Why are you dressed as a stripper?” she asked.

  Kinsella walked around to the far side of the table and sat down without waiting for an invitation. “I can see why they wanted to lock you up,” he said.

  She looked down at the pile of broccoli sitting beside her spork and fidgeted with a piece. “Is there anything I can help you with?” she asked, not looking up from her work.

/>   A tortured, raspy noise slipped from Kinsella’s mouth. She wondered if he was getting used to his new, less–prestigious station in life. “Yes,” he finally said. “Our captain called you a terrorist. Are you one?”

  Stein fiddled with the spork some more before she shook her head. “I wasn’t at the time, no.”

  “But maybe since? Van girl?” Kinsella asked, a thin smile on his face. “Okay. So, you’re not a terrorist. Or maybe just a casual one. So why’d he call you one? What’d you do to piss him off so much?”

  Everything about the man in front of her was disagreeable, which she longed to tell him about, in great detail. But, she reluctantly had to admit, they were on the same side. At least the side that Helot wasn’t on. Whatever shenanigans she’d accomplished with Bruce, they paled beside what the mayor was surely planning. She had noticed the battle yesterday, couldn’t help not to, when the fucking sun went off. And as spectacularly poorly as that had gone for the mayor’s idiot brigade, it was only the first battle. If anyone was going to keep the ship in one piece, it was this oily, oily man. So, she told her story, explaining how she had blundered into Helot’s plot, embellishing the good bits and fudging the parts which badly incriminated her.

  Kinsella listened attentively. “That’s incredible,” he said when she finished. “And thank you for glossing over the parts where you clearly broke the law. That could have been awkward.”

  Stein smiled and shrugged, rewarding herself by setting up another piece of broccoli on the spork. “Why do you care?” she asked, launching the green into the air, this one landing neatly in the light fixture. “Six for twenty–four.” She set up another piece. “It sounds like you knew all that already.”

  Kinsella’s eyebrows did a funny kind of waggling motion. She realized he was trying to be coy. “Indeed, I did,” he said. “The captain told me himself. Straight from the horse’s mouth.” He leaned back and grinned. Stein wondered what orifice Kinsella was in this analogy.

  “He told you he was going to split the ship in half? Why? When?”

  “Just before he tried. I think he was bragging. He seemed a little desperate to tell someone how clever he’d been,” Kinsella said, chuckling. She returned her attention to the spork and launched another piece of broccoli into the air, watching it rise up, ricochet off the light, and come back down on Kinsella’s head. He snatched the spork away from her. “Will you listen to me?”

  “Never stopped.”

  Kinsella threw the spork over his shoulder. “Well, listen harder.” He swallowed once and spread his hands flat on the table. “One thing our captain also mentioned was that if the ship were to split in two, our half could survive for hundreds of years. What do you think of that?”

  One of the nice things about being wrongfully imprisoned was that she had had plenty of time to consider exactly that question. “We do have the auxiliary reactor,” she said. “And lots of fuel. So, you know, on paper it could work.”

  “Paper,” the mayor echoed.

  “But I’m worried about the insulation,” she said. Seeing the blank look on the mayor’s face, she continued. “All around the outer hull of this thing is a whole bunch of something that looks like metallic diapers. That’s what keeps us warm, more than anything else. Stops us from leaking energy.” Kinsella nodded once, at least faking comprehension. “But if Helot pops the ass end of the ship off, that exposes a whole different chunk to space. An uninsulated chunk. Even if it is airtight, with no insulation along that surface, we’d start bleeding energy like crazy.”

  “How long would it take for us to run out?”

  “One year? One hundred? Who knows?” Out of her pocket, she produced another spork and set it up in front of her. “Ask a math guy.”

  Kinsella glared at the new spork but let her keep it. “And we couldn’t make more insulation?”

  “Maybe. We can make most things. But we’ve never made that before. And we’d need a few square kilometers of it.”

  Kinsella rubbed his hands together. He reached out and turned the spork over in his hands, then set it back down, placing a piece of broccoli on it. Stein watched this all carefully, as he made the same mistakes she made her first time. Tentatively he raised his hand up in the air, looked at her for some sign of encouragement, saw none, frowned, then brought his hand down hard on the end of the spork, sending the piece of broccoli smashing into his face.

  Kinsella rubbed his cheek, glaring at Stein, who, having seen it coming, didn’t need to work too hard not to smile. His throat worked up and down, swallowing. “How much time do we have, do you think? To stop him?”

  “Before he tries again?” She shrugged. That depended on how many fuse torches he had left and how long it would take to make another one. “No idea. A month? Maybe two?”

  “So, if we want to stop him, we have to do it soon.” Kinsella flipped the spork aside and rubbed his face again. “Can you help? I’m not going to demean you by asking you to do it for the sake of your fellow shipmates; I will make this worth your while.”

  “And if my while is incredibly expensive?” she said, gesturing at the pile of broccoli.

  He raised an eyebrow, then shook his head, chuckling. “Look. I need someone with your knowledge.” Kinsella pointed at the light fixture. “Remember how he turned off the fucking sun? Can you maybe stop him from doing that again? And can he do that with anything else? Stop our food mills? Shut off the life support?”

  Stein bit her lip. “Yeah. He can.” Seeing Kinsella swallow, she added, “I can probably stop that, though.”

  “Good.” He pointed at her. “Do that, and you can have anything you want. All the broccoli on the ship? It’s yours.” He sat back in his chair, looking pleased with himself. “After that, well, we’ll see if we can’t find some other way to make use of your remarkable resourcefulness.” Another unsettling smile. “Maybe you can come up with some poison or sleeping gases we could pump through their air. Knock them all out.” Seeing her completely undisguised look of shock, he held up his hands defensively. “Just thinking aloud.” He patted the table a couple of times, a gesture that looked like it was meant to conclude conversation, then stood up and stepped away from his chair.

  As she watched him adjust the stethoscope around his neck, mumbling something about looking more doctor–y, she realized there was still a big piece of the puzzle missing, then wondered how much of that was deliberate. “Did he say why he was doing it?” she asked.

  Kinsella stopped, turned back to face her. “Helot?” he asked. She nodded. Who else? Kinsella shrugged. “Nope. He didn’t say. Because he’s an asshole, I suspect.”

  Stein nodded, playing along. “He certainly acts the part.”

  Kinsella laughed again. She realized she hadn’t see him laugh before and could see why he avoided doing it in public. “He certainly does,” he agreed. With a wave, he turned and left the cafeteria.

  Alone again, Stein fidgeted with the spork, spinning it around in front of her, not really looking as it danced between her fingers. How do you tell when the mayor is lying? It sounded like a trick question, the set up to a creaky old joke. The punch line — “When his mouth is open” — didn’t feel helpful here. Not when so much of what he had said was obviously true.

  “Helot? Nope, he didn’t say.” That was certainly plausible — she had a hard time understanding why Helot told anything to the mayor at all. But what if he had said? Why was Helot splitting the ship anyways? This was something else she had had time to think about alone in her jail cell, and “Because he’s an asshole,” was about the best she could come up with herself.

  But only after her surprise mayoral visit did she realize how dangerously lazy that reasoning was. Asshole though he might be, Helot clearly wasn’t a dummy; he had a reason for splitting the ship. And Kinsella, oily though he might be, was also no dummy. He would have come to the same conclusion she had. Whatever reason Helot had for splitting the ship, it would almost certainly be good enough for Kinsella to do the s
ame.

  Helping Kinsella wasn’t the answer. It was just trading one monster for another.

  She took the final step in this line of reasoning and smashed the spork down in frustration, flinging a chunk of broccoli against the ceiling. We might actually need a monster. If they really did have to split the ship and leave thousands to die, it would certainly take a monster to do that. And if that was the case, it might be a useful thing to get on the good side of at least one of the monsters.

  She just wished it didn’t have to be the oily one.

  §

  Koller chewed methodically on his meal bar. Bite, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew. Swallow. On occasion, he breathed. He had heard somewhere that it was a bad sign being conscious of your own breathing. It meant you were dying, he thought. Or very, very bored. He breathed again, and wondered if it could be both.

  He had been camped in the tiny duct for a day, sleeping and taking all his meals there. Thorias had been insistent on that; now that he had advertised his existence, no more setting up in a place where he could be shot first.

  But no going home yet either; Thorias wanted the Othersider sniper taken out. The sensors he was picking off were becoming increasingly valuable. There were only a half–dozen left, and they had proved useful coordinating the defenses during the previous day’s battle. And if the Othersider sniper wanted to get nastier, there were an awful lot of security officers in the well to get nasty on. Which meant that until he was stopped, Koller was doomed to be conscious of his own breathing.

  He breathed and craned his neck over to look at the display on the smart rifle. Still on. He breathed. He wasn’t doing any manual searching this time — he would stay still and rely on the counter–sniper software to react when the Othersider finally came out of hiding and took a shot. Which had been a long, long wait. He breathed.