by Jamie Sawyer
“Is there a point to this conversation?” I asked.
James laughed. “Just do what you got to do, Major. To protect the ones you love.”
We sat for a long while, drinking our beers, old men on a house porch at dusk. That was how I felt: old and used up. I was far from drinking my fill but I was out of touch with the rest of the room. I didn’t recognise the music, didn’t recognise the faces. Even Jenkins and Kaminski; they were more than just soldiers. They were people beyond the gun and the armour—
There was a sudden commotion at the end of the bar.
The atmosphere around me – such that it was – suddenly crashed. Although I was drunk, my senses immediately sharpened.
Kaminski bolted from his table, across the hall. Jenkins was standing over at the rec bar now, laughing. Williams was beside her, leaning close into her personal space. From where I sat, I couldn’t tell whether the attention was invited or not: Jenkins’ back was to me. The crowd parted, and I saw a flash of Williams’ hand on the small of her back.
“Hey!” Kaminski yelled, jabbing a finger towards them. “Asshole!”
Williams immediately withdrew his hand; faked ignorance of the angry trooper shouting across the room.
“Just leave it, ’Ski,” I called after him.
“What the fuck you doing?” Kaminski said, his voice dripping with Brooklynese. “I’m talking, you fucker!”
The party seemed to freeze, officers and crew standing aside to let Kaminski through. He stormed across the room.
“Hey, man,” Williams said. “Way to go to spoil the mood. I’m just talking to the sergeant about old times, is all. Butt out and sit down.”
“I can handle it, ’Ski!” Jenkins said. She glared indignantly at Williams too; making it clear that whatever his intentions, she wasn’t interested.
Kaminski bobbed his head, pressed on: in Williams’ face within seconds. Before I could follow him, Kaminski balled a fist and threw a punch.
“Whoa, Private!” Williams canted.
He ducked the blow with surprising speed. Kaminski connected with a bottle of beer on the bar, smashing it. Onlookers retreated in a wide arc of the two fighters.
Kaminski set his jaw. I’d seen that look on his face before; and knew that he wouldn’t be cowed. He lashed out with another right hook. This time the blow caught Williams squarely in the mouth. He reeled back.
“Y…you fucking hit me!”
There was a bright smear of blood on his lip.
The Warfighters were suddenly behind Williams. They bristled bad energy; just drunk enough to take out their frustrations on anyone who got in their way. Looking at the big Martian’s death-stare, considering his enormous bulk, I didn’t want to have to take him on in my own skin.
“We were just talking about old times, man!” Williams repeated. He wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand.
“’Ski!” Jenkins roared. Her eyes flared and she immediately looked a whole lot more like a soldier, regardless of what she was wearing. “I said I can handle this myself!”
I considered what to do. Martinez and Mason were on either side of me now.
“I’d like nothing more than to put that big red bastard down,” Martinez said, pointing at the Warfighter. “New Girl is with me.”
I didn’t want this deteriorating into an all-out bar brawl: not in a pressure-cooker environment like the Colossus.
“Stand down,” I said. “Kaminski, step away.”
He reluctantly backed from the bar but kept his eyes on Williams. A blonde medtech – a woman I’d seen around the Medical Deck – moved to Williams’ side, wiping at his split lip with a wet towel. It didn’t look serious; had been more of a warning shot than a serious assault. Just as Kaminski eyed Williams, the medtech kept eyes on Jenkins: the look that told me, whatever the truth of the situation, she thought Jenkins was somehow to blame.
“We need to talk,” I said to Kaminski. “Everyone else, I think it’s time to call it a night. Williams, see to your people.”
Williams nodded slowly, senses dulled by drink and the recent blow. He waved over to his team. The two female troopers came to his side, the big Martian following shortly after.
“I’ll take you down to the infirmary,” the medtech said, coddling Williams’ jaw. “Get you fixed right up.” Under her breath: “They’re damn animals.”
I watched them leave the mess hall, Williams making the most of his injury.
I turned to James. “Nice talking with you, Lieutenant.”
He lifted his beer in my direction. “And you, Major.”
Then I marched Kaminski outside, grabbing a bottle of vodka from the bar as we left.
We rode the elevator all the way up to the starship’s top deck. Kaminski remained in petulant silence throughout: arms crossed, breathing through his nose. Suited me fine.
“Where are we going?” he eventually asked.
“Hydroponics. You need some space to cool down.”
The Hydroponics deck was huge – several hundred square metres, crammed with gene-spliced plant strains. Arranged into oversized and automated feeding troughs, the plants provided a back-up oxygen-source and in an emergency could yield limited foodstuffs. On a ship this size, both of those aims were likely to be missed by a long way – we’d surely starve and suffocate should life support give out – but it was somewhere quiet. Overhead, banks of hanging halogen lamps flickered on as we entered. I squinted against the strong illumination; switched some of the lamps off. Satisfied with the artificial twilight, I picked my way through the jungle. Kaminski followed behind.
“What was that about?” I asked him.
I wandered around the edge of a planter, senses overloaded with a variety of exotic pollens. The smells were alien to me: nearly choking.
“Nothing.”
“You want to spend your whole career as a PFC?”
“Not especially.”
“Then hitting a senior officer, even if he is an asshole, isn’t a very good idea. Williams is a captain, for fuck sake.”
Kaminski fumbled around another planter, setting off the watering system. He jumped back – cursing as water pumped across the monstrous roots of the plant.
“Where I come from, there are no plants like this,” Kaminski grumbled. “There are no plants. Period.”
“You can quit the big-time Brooklyn front, Vinnie. I know where you come from, and you know where I started too.”
An avid gardener had assembled a couple of deck loungers, like those found on the pleasure decks of interplanetary cruise liners, in one corner. From the piles of empty beer cans and ration packs that were piled beside them, I reckoned that the operation had been conducted without Admiral Loeb’s approval, but whoever was responsible was long gone.
Reluctantly, Kaminski helped me move the loungers into a better position, beside one of the floor-to-wall view-ports.
“That’s better,” I said. “Now sit. We need to talk.”
I sat on my lounger and cracked open the unlabelled vodka bottle. I took a mouthful of the harsh liquor. I liked vodka: drunk neat, it had an immediate and honest effect. I felt that numbness begin to creep through me, moving me one step closer to being properly drunk. I passed it to Kaminski. He flopped onto a lounger as well. Took the bottle and drank deep from it.
“That would strip paint,” he said.
“It’s alcoholic,” I said. “It’ll do.”
Kaminski stared around the deck. “This place is nasty. Why’d you bring me up here?”
“To give you some space. You’re the longest-serving Legionnaire, and you know that I cut you slack whenever I can, but that was out of order.”
Kaminski stared at the floor for a beat. He looked a lot like a big kid.
“Are you listening to me?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Kaminski said. “I hear you.”
“I can’t condone you hitting an officer.”
“Even Williams?”
“Especially Willia
ms.”
“I know. I’ll apologise to him.”
“Good.”
“Doesn’t make it right…” he started. “He had his hands all over her…”
“I’ll dress it up, make it look like you were at fault. I know it’s not easy, but I warned you about keeping this professional. A couple of nights in the sack doesn’t make Jenkins your weakness all of a sudden, does it?”
Kaminski smiled weakly. “Guess not.”
“Because you can’t think like that, Kaminski. Not in this job.”
Kaminski gave a long sigh. He looked pained all of a sudden. “She’s all I have,” he said. I passed him the vodka but he waved it away. “Do you know the first thing that I did when we got back from Helios? I commed home. I haven’t done that in years. An automated message every Christmas, the occasional birthday comm. That’s the contact I got with home. That’s how my old ma remembers me. Or how she used to remember me. She had Alzheimer’s before we left.”
“I guess the time away didn’t help?” I offered.
“No,” Kaminski said. “It didn’t. I didn’t begrudge it one bit but I blew a whole year’s wages on an FTL link. We talked for a while. She didn’t recognise me at all. I haven’t got anyone left, except Jenkins.”
“And the Legion.”
“Yeah – and the Legion.”
“Just watch it, is all. I know that Williams is bad news. He’s a lazy bastard I’d rather be without, but Cole chose him. You can’t let your private life interfere with work.”
Kaminski nodded. “Understood.”
“Now, get an early night and sleep it off.”
I polished off the vodka, in several uninterrupted mouthfuls, and let the stuff hit me. I’d quickly reached the sweet spot of being just drunk enough: the boundary between being incapable of coherent thought, and being comfortably numb. I dropped the empty bottle into the pile of trash. We both stood, pushed our way through the artificial jungle.
But my night wasn’t over; not by a long way.
I knew that the SOC would be empty by now. Anyone left awake would be at the party. This was the perfect time to move. After making sure that Kaminski had actually got back to the barracks, I fumbled my way into Medical. The entire ship was on night-cycle and the med-bay was deserted. That suited me just fine.
I desperately needed to know whether she was real; whether the woman I’d encountered on the Artefact really was Elena.
“She’s all I have as well,” I whispered to the dark. “And I need to go back.”
I stripped out of my fatigues. I activated my simulator-tank and the intimate electric hum filled the air. Through the glass canopy, it glowed with an effervescent blue light – holding such promise, seemingly just beyond my reach. I’d seen this done so many times before that I was more than qualified to do it myself.
Just one more death, that might be all it takes, the voice taunted in my ear.
“I doubt it,” I said, steadying myself against the tank exterior.
Slowly, swaying under the influence of a bellyful of vodka and a gut-load of disappointment, I realised that there was another light in the room: another blue glow, from the corner of my eye.
Williams’ simulator-tank.
Not only was his tank operational but he was inside it. Caught in the cradle of data-cables and feeder tubes, his hardcopy bobbed tranquilly. I watched him for a long moment, processing what I was seeing – in my state, that took longer than it should have done. His eyes were tightly shut and the muscles of his face occasionally twitched.
Where Kaminski had hit him, there was no injury at all.
Was I imagining this as well? Maybe things were getting worse.
The monitor above his simulator was in sleep mode – had been running for a while, I reckoned. It flickered to life as I approached.
CAPTAIN LANCE WILLIAMS: TRANSITION CONFIRMED…
MISSION IN PROGRESS…
The timer was running.
“Well I’ll be damned…”
Where has he gone? I asked myself. Surely not somewhere aboard the Colossus: someone would’ve seen him, called the incident in. The same went for the other warships in the fleet. I struggled to see any purpose in making transition, to board one of those vessels. There was nowhere else for him to go but the Artefact. Just the idea that he might have seen Elena: it somehow stirred the coals of my anger. She was mine, and whether she was real or not Williams had no Christo-damned right to see her.
“Get a fucking grip. We don’t even know if he can see her.”
Of course, the holo-psych suggested, if she’s real, then he will definitely be able to see her.
I frantically searched the other tanks, ensuring that they were unoccupied. Maybe I was so drunk that I’d missed it, that the rest of his simulant team were engaged as well. But the other tanks were empty.
I thought for a moment about extracting Williams, about hitting the emergency override and bringing him – or at least his consciousness – back to the Colossus. I dismissed that idea: I needed to know why he was out there, and what he was doing.
Only one way to find out.
I lurched over the SOC control system. Slowly punched in the relevant command codes. Christo knows how I managed to obtain a firing solution for the drop-capsule, but I did. In double-vision I reviewed the destination of Williams’ capsule. I was right; he had boarded the Artefact. There: near the frontal facing. If it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. I selected the same coordinates.
Clambered into my own simulator and let muscle-memory do the rest: jacking in my data-ports, clasping the respirator to my mouth.
I hit the COMMENCE TRANSITION button.
I’d operated a simulant in most environments and in many conditions. When you’ve done this as many times as I have, it’s very easy to think that there’s nothing left to be learnt from the technology.
But I was definitely learning something from this transition.
I was pushing my mental and physical boundaries. As I slammed the operating controls, I realised that I had never actually done this drunk. Aboard the Liberty Point, the medtechs and psychs wouldn’t have allowed it. I imagined their frowning faces outside the tank: peering in, disapproving. Beyond disapproving: I was quite sure that I would be seriously reprimanded. A major in the Alliance Army – with so many years under my belt – should know better than to operate heavy machinery while drunk.
The experience was disconcerting, to say the least.
One second I was raging drunk, having difficulty focusing on the world around me, nausea creeping through my gut.
The next I was absolutely awake, utterly sharp.
Simulant senses took over and I became hyper-aware. I was instantly sober; like I had jumped off a cliff, been hit by an air-car, shot with a gun. The drink and that cloying deprivation of senses that it brings with it just vanished.
My HUD came online, flashed with boot messages, and I stared out into the familiar dark. I was inside my combat-armour, in a drop-capsule, inside a firing tube aboard the Colossus.
CANCEL LAUNCH SEQUENCE? the AI asked me, reading the state of my biorhythms.
FUCK NO, I transmitted. CONFIRM LAUNCH.
CONFIRMED. T MINUS FIVE SECONDS UNTIL DROP.
I lay still in the capsule and let the ship do the rest.
I made the descent.
Drunk, I’d forgotten almost completely about Loeb’s prohibition on further simulant trips until the Rift-storm had abated.
Sober, I recalled the fact immediately.
It was a very rough trip down. Once I’d breached the null-shield, near-space became a storm-tossed sea. Not in the physical sense: space looked just as calm and serene as it ever had. But while there was nothing to see, the instrumentation on my suit and capsule told a very different story. The region was being bombarded with squalling particle matter; engulfed by a tsunami of magnetic waves. The Colossus and her sister ships had advanced protective measures for such an occurrence –
weather patterns like this were unfortunate, but hardly unexpected in the wilderness space of the Maelstrom. Once the hatches were battened down, the storm was of limited threat to the starships.
To me, travelling through the void in the drop-capsule, sealed within my combat-suit, it was potentially lethal. My suit rebooted twice; shorted by electrical spikes. Alarms started to flood my head. I very quickly realised that I was losing control of this drop.
“Fuck!” I shouted as the drop-capsule jinked and wove, battering me inside the tight confines.
Something shorted out with a spray of sparks, so close to my head that it left scorch-marks on the outside of my face-plate. My combat-suit administered dizzying, poisonous levels of sedative and anti-sickness drugs. I began to think that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe the Buzzard had made the right choice in restricting expeditions while the Rift was active—
Williams must’ve done it. I can do it too.
Then the drop-capsule shed around me. I triggered my thruster pack. I was through the worst of the storm; inbound on my set coordinates. It wasn’t a pleasant drop, by any stretch, but it was suddenly manageable. The urgent need to vomit subsided.
I landed near an airlock.
Safely down on the Artefact, I took in my surroundings. In miniature, the Colossus hovered above me – kilometres from my position. I thought of the party in the mess hall: now just a tiny dot of light on the hull of the warship. I had bigger things to worry about. I wasn’t part of their world any more.
The rest of the fleet – those sixteen other anonymous starships – was positioned in a precise arc around the Artefact. The Damascus Rift was unusually bright tonight, and cast the ship hulls in a green nimbus. The display was perversely beautiful. A reminder of nature’s unchecked ferocity.