Interim: On the run from the Galactic FTL Police

by P. K. Lentz

  “You know...” Gareth began hesitantly. He was loath to show the woman too much concern lest she shove it back in his face as she’d done before. But he swallowed his pride and just came out with it. “Once you’re out there,” he said, “I will come back for you. No matter what.”

  Even as he spoke Gareth knew that it was not Zerouali he hoped to reassure, but himself. She had already accused him of having ghosts, and she was right. Long buried, they lurked as a shadow beneath the surface of his thoughts, threatening to return in force at moments just like this one.

  But now was no time for ghosts. Gareth thrust them back down into that deep hiding place in his mind where they had dwelt unheeded for centuries.

  Perhaps mercifully, Zerouali chose not to comment. She just gave a curt nod, her impenetrable eyes blinking perhaps one too many times. On his way out Gareth plucked his weapon from the floor. Likely he would have no use for it, but it wasn’t the sort of thing a responsible captain left lying around on his deck.

  He laughed inwardly at himself then, reduced to a safety marshal on his own ship.

  ***

  ‘It’s not our business, Ascher.’

  ‘There must be some good reason she’s here.’

  ‘So that’s what the meds do in their spare time.’

  Such were the comments offered by Ascher’s colleagues and acquaintances aboard Hunter in the Dark when he’d told them of the pregnant woman he’d seen tied up in the ship’s medsuites.

  “You didn’t see her,” Ascher pressed. “She was terrified.”

  But he dropped the subject when he realized he was getting nowhere. They didn’t even want to hear it.

  Ascher’s next brief rest period was interrupted not by the usual interference from his own neurilace but by a series of chimes from his room’s terminal. Fighting through a fog of sleep, he dragged himself from his cot and stepped over to the panel beside the door of his two-by-three meter berth. He rubbed his eyes to bring the display into focus.

  When he saw it, he rubbed them again.

  >>HELLO SIMON.

  Strange. Even if his privacy blocks hadn’t been engaged, who would message him? Was he even on a first-name basis with anyone aboard?

  Once he’d collected himself he keyed in a reply.

  >>WHO IS THIS?

  >>FRIEND. NEED A FAVOR. YOU’RE ONLY ONE ABOARD CAN HELP.

  Ascher sighed. At the moment he could barely hold his eyelids open, much less carry on a conversation.

  >>NEED SLEEP. CAN IT WAIT?

  >>SORRY. YOU ARE ONLY ONE NOT INFECTED, SIMON.

  >>INFECTED?

  >>VIRUS. A PRESENCE.

  >>THIS IS A JOKE. WHO ARE YOU?

  >>NO JOKE. NEED YOU TO RESCUE SOMEONE. YOU HAVE SEEN HER. SAVE HER AND LEAVE THIS SHIP.

  >>SURE, I’LL JUST STEP OUT AN AIRLOCK. LET ME SLEEP!!!!

  >>LOOK IN YOUR STORAGE BIN. THINK IT OVER, BUT MUST ACT SOON. GOOD NIGHT.

  The words faded from the display. Ascher stood in the dark, literally and figuratively, wondering what could possibly have just occurred. It could only be some sort of joke, one of his shipmates teasing him after what he had said earlier. He muttered a mild curse and returned to the welcome comfort of his bed. But before he could sleep, the instruction to look in his storage bin began to eat at him. Had his tormentors gone so far as to break into his berth and plant something? He rose again and keyed open his locker.

  What he found there could not have been planted by just anyone. Before him was a standard Fleet ID badge belonging to one ‘Ensign 3rd Class Hellene Hawthorne.’ The image the card bore was that of the woman he’d seen in the medsuites. Beneath that was a neatly folded uniform matching the rank and assignment on the ID.

  And behind them: a standard-issue beam weapon of the make used by Fleet Security. In a blind panic Ascher shoved all three items deep into the bottom of his locker. He covered them over and slammed the door, holding it shut with his body as if something might try to burst out. His heavy breath was littered with whispered curses.

  This is a nightmare, he told himself. I’ll wake up and none of it will have happened.

  But he didn’t wake up. Nor did he sleep again before the start of his next duty cycle.

  ***

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Reissa InfoFLUX - Your total news source for Reissa and beyond.

  Celebrating 450 years!

  I.0286.05.22 13:02

  Commonwealth:Politics:OPINION

  The Grand Delusion - Part 2 of 2

  by Adm. Karina Althauser, 3rd Fleet (Ret.)

  It is profound fallacy to believe that generations of deeply ingrained madness can be erased through the minimal guidance and social engineering that the Interim provides to backward planets at its own great expense. No sooner does one world achieve a degree of stability than another collapses into anarchy. No scholar has accurately calculated the average continuous life expectancy of a planetary civilization, mostly because the relevant data is so difficult to collect and interpret. But given what evidence exists, Reissa and her twelve siblings of the Commonwealth, planets whose combined histories of peace and stability amount to more than thirty millennia, would seem indisputably to fall well above the median.

  And there need be no end to that prosperity. The very goal of a unified humanity must be to guarantee its own existence in perpetuity. Yet failure in that goal will be assured the moment this fragile equation admits too many unpredictable variables. The building of a civilization requires generations of steady progress, while undoing it takes but seconds. Chaos is the natural state, order the exception. Even the laziest among us can destroy, while those who cherish order must toil endlessly and remain ever vigilant. Antimatter weapons can sterilize a world’s surface in the blink of an eye, and translight offers attackers the means to deliver such deadly payloads with total surprise and slim chance of interception. Millennia of peaceful achievement can be thus be erased in a single, horrifying instant.

  Thus the elements capable of unleashing such terror on peace-loving peoples must never be allowed the opportunity to do so. Yet I would argue that this unspeakable scenario is not merely possible, but inevitable. Recent optimistic estimates project that the Interim will be at least six thousand years old before our Commonwealth encompasses, at its current rate of expansion, all of the human species. Even more bleak calculations maintain that it can never succeed but rather only move forward by halves, never reaching its envisioned end.

  Some would say that this is good enough, that such an ambitious project as ours cannot be hurried, or that uniting ninety-five percent of humanity would of itself constitute grand enough an achievement. I would call such people hopelessly naive. To accept such thinking presupposes that in the course of the next six millennia (more than twenty times again what has already passed since the Founding) not one mistake shall be made, not one single error of judgment shall occur which allows the supreme powers of life and death to fall into the hands of madmen. Further, should the nightmare scenario transpire, there could not then be a single fault in our capacity to defend our lives and our freedom from the resulting existential threat. Indeed, one mistake is all we will be allowed before the negbombs start falling.

  What then must be done? Do we sit patiently and await proof that our monopoly on translight has been compromised? Do we wait until the shining cities of Reissa or Verond lie in ruins?

  No, because by that time doom will be already upon us. As the gardener must prune a diseased branch to save the tree, so must we prune the diseased and malformed branches of our species to ensure the continued prosperity of the whole. As beings of conscience it will quite rightly pain us to undertake such a grim endeavor, but undertake it we must and with surgical precision, without anger or malice, thinking only of what is best for the future of our lonely race.

  The present Commonwealth has run its course. We must now embark upon a new path for the sake of that bright dream of bequeathing to our children--nay, to the universe--the gift of
a peaceful and united humanity, a single civilization built upon the foundations of freedom and dignity and prosperity, lasting unto eternity. The sole voice of culture and intelligence in this bleak void we all inhabit must never be permitted to fall silent.

  [END]

  ***

  Aprile screamed and writhed in agony as Thorien struggled to restrain her. She alternated between fighting him off and clawing desperately at her own face. Fyat stood close by, observing with stony disinterest.

  Watching the scene unfold, Gareth laughed. He laughed even harder when without warning Aprile launched a stream of vomit into the assassin’s chest.

  This put an end to Fyat’s patience; in one swift move he pinned the flailing Aprile to the wall by her wrists. She kicked ineffectually at him a few times before giving up in a fit of sobbing. Lady’s doctor Thorien, who’d been enlisted for the Saerix ‘trials’ dictated by Fyat’s plan, applied a hypo of sedative to her neck.

  In a flash of lucidity Gareth stifled his laughter. His close friend and crewmate was suffering a violent reaction to the very same mind-altering substance that made him think the whole thing was funny. He had never seen Aprile cry until now. Such indignity was her reward for having lived a clean life and failed to build any tolerance for illicit drugs.

  His crewmate’s agony managed to pierce, if just a little, the chemical shroud that enveloped Gareth’s brain. The scene ceased to be amusing, at any rate. Instead he began to grow angry at the one who’d caused it.

  “Fix her!” he blurted at Fyat, then almost laughed at how stupid he must have sounded. “What a fucking ship I run! Letting some fascist killer dope up my crew!”

  Gareth had begun to rise to confront the assassin when a hand on his arm offered gentle discouragement. He turned to find that the hand attached to an arm, which was in turn attached to Zerouali, who sat beside him on the couch. She was the only one in the room who seemed to be paying him any attention. Typically, though, her expression didn’t reveal much.

  Easing back onto the couch Gareth all but forgot why he had risen. Instead he now found himself dumbly fixated on the woman who’d stopped him. Zerouali met his empty gaze evenly for a beat before returning her attention to the more interesting events centered around Aprile.

  Gareth stared at the fugitive in profile. His eyes followed the gentle lines of her neck, chin, nose, forehead, up and down and back again. He wanted to trace the smooth shapes with his finger.

  “Something wrong, Captain?” the subject of his study asked without so much as a glance in his direction.

  Gareth spent a few seconds puzzling over the meaning of her words. Then he forgot them. What intrigued him far more was the movement of her lips. They were a deep red-brown, not too full but not thin. Didn’t she ever smile? She should. Maybe she would speak again. He liked watching her mouth move.

  He liked the rest of her, too. If only she could learn to lighten up a little.

  Without further thought on the subject Gareth set his face on a steady course for the woman’s cheek. Zerouali’s profile, in particular those lips, filled more and more of his vision. Then suddenly the woman’s head turned and Gareth was approaching her head-on.

  Vaguely mindful that he might be in trouble, Gareth nonetheless continued his steady advance, the goal of which was just a taste of those tempting lips.

  Just centimeters from success, he was stopped by a hand clamped viselike over his jaw.

  “Did you want something, Captain?”

  Drawn by her warm breath and flitting lips Gareth made one final push for contact, but to no avail. The hand on his face offered too much resistance.

  “Perhaps you might try this approach with the Interim,” Zerouali suggested softly.

  Gareth really had no idea what she was saying. He did, however, sense that it was time to admit defeat. Backing off, he focused hazily, reluctantly, on the room’s other occupants.

  Thorien’s injection seemed to have had some effect on Aprile, though her sobs proved she was still hurting. After one minute or several--the Saerix ensured he had no clue--Gareth hung his head and sank into a dreamlike fog.

  He was roused by someone snapping in his face. Looking up, Gareth scowled in displeasure. Fyat loomed over him.

  Memories drifted back. One of them involving Zerouali might have been pleasant if not for the knot of embarrassment it caused in his stomach. But that was for later. Right now Aprile lay motionless in a cot, the only other presence in the room with him besides Fyat.

  “How is she?” Gareth asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “She’ll be fine,” Fyat said without sympathy. “The revised plan is to let her remain comatose. It may be better for us that way. Now come with me. Time to rehearse your interrogation.”

  Gareth sighed heavily. He sensed reality lurking somewhere just out of reach. “I can’t face Fleet like this,” he said. “I can barely keep a thought in my head, much less a lie.”

  “For your own sake you’ll find a way.” Fyat stepped back and lowered the opaque lenses over his cold, dead eyes. “Stand.”

  The mock interrogation began with some simple factual questions. Gareth answered them with practiced ease. These lies hardly even counted as lies anymore; they were so much second nature to him as to be indistinguishable from truth.

  Then came the life-or-death questions, the required response to which was, of course, total ignorance. Gareth answered them through a mild and not entirely unpleasant cloak of unreality. Several times Fyat corrected his wording or delivery. The interrogators, he explained, would not rely solely on their equipment, but would react equally to old-fashioned verbal and nonverbal cues. It was necessary to deceive not only their sensors but also the human eyes and ears behind them. More and more it seemed an insurmountable task. Gareth began to lose hope.

  “That was miserable,” Fyat said after the first hour-long drill. “Again.”

  “This isn’t going to work. I can’t go into this thing half-witted when--”

  “Again.”

  Gareth scowled, but he gave in. He had no choice.

  The second and third sessions went slightly better. By the fourth, Fyat was almost satisfied.

  ***

  Vice-commander Daniel Sallat delivered his next scheduled briefing to Bohringer just as the captain was returning from a brief rest cycle.

  “Hunter in the Dark has made its final translation in-system and is currently under propulsion to Merada,” Sallat began. “ETA is four hours. Their last comm beacon contained some instructions. First, we are to have our negotiating team standing by for transfer to Hunter upon arrival. Their hostage is revived and ready.”

  “Negotiations,” Bohringer almost spat. “Is the team assembled?”

  “Almost, sir. I was hoping I could lead it myself.”

  “Granted. Why aboard Hunter and not here?”

  “I presume because it is the flagship, sir. Or possibly because we’ve sustained damage.”

  The captain grumbled acknowledgment, dismissing the unwanted reminder of his failure. Sallat proceed undeterred.

  “Hunter’s communiqué also contained an upgrade to our neurilace security protocols, to be broadcast shipwide under command encryption.”

  Bohringer shrugged. “Schedule it.”

  Sallat hesitated, mindful that his next request might be mistaken for disloyalty. “Permission to delay the broadcast, sir?”

  Bohringer seemed more curious than suspicious. “On what grounds?”

  “I took the liberty of asking some of our techs to examine it. Their names appear in my submitted report. There are some elements within the code that cause them to recommend further review.”

  As he pondered this, Bohringer looked (quite typically, Sallat thought with mild annoyance) as if half his mind were elsewhere. “Second-guessing Command is not standard procedure,” the Captain said at length. “What made you question the upgrade?”

  How much detail to offer him? Sallat wondered. The explanation was less than straigh
tforward. Upon his first review of Hunter’s communiqué, the enclosed security upgrade had leapt unbidden to his viewer, decrypting itself and scrolling to a seemingly random section of code. Three times when he dismissed it, his display had promptly repeated the same action. Since his own programming experience was virtually nil, he had passed the file along to a security-cleared senior tech for urgent analysis. Once that action had been taken, his display returned to normal functioning.

  “A slight glitch in the file led me to submit it for review,” Sallat simplified, mindful of his captain’s selective attention span. “I’m prepared to accept disciplinary action. However, I believe the concerns raised are still worthy of address.”

  With the often-used wave of his hand, Bohringer indicated dismissal. “You probably violated policy,” he said, “but damned if I’m going to look up which paragraph. How do you propose to explain the delay?”

  “Command needn’t know. But if necessary, we express concern that our copy was corrupted during transmission.”

  “Very well,” Bohringer replied, but his next words were an unsubtle warning. “For your own sake you’d better be right. Dismissed.”

  ***

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Gareth awoke from several hours of deep sleep with the Saerix trip a dull memory. Lightheadedness soon yielded to simmering anger--at Fyat, at the universe, at himself. He had passed centuries now without major incident, world after world with nothing worse than a disorderly conduct charge here and there. Now, with a Fleet warship within spitting distance, Lady of Chaos was suddenly a magnet for the Interim’s most wanted. And what was its senior crew doing? Sleeping off a bad Saerix trip.