by J. R. Mabry
She stepped over one of the corpses—a mustachioed sergeant, his eyes wide and still as stone, his mouth frozen in a silent scream. A few steps away were civilians—three men in Bedouin garb and an older woman in a sequined red dress. Those must be the captain’s contacts, she thought.
There were more bodies on the other side of a stained sectional couch. Her heart fell as she recognized her captain. Telouse was face down, but she would recognize his curly gray locks anywhere. She knelt by him and felt at his neck. There was no pulse, just as she knew there wouldn’t be. “Don’t touch anything,” she said. “Gloves.” She pulled a small plastic packet out of her jacket and ripped it open with her teeth. Inside were polyethylene gloves, which she put on quickly. She made a mental note to wipe her prints off the front door. “Don’t spit, don’t shed, don’t blink off an eyelash.” It was an impossible order, of course, but she didn’t want anything that would tie them to this place. Not with Authority cops involved.
The doctor, his hands already gloved, knelt by the captain to confirm his status, then moved on to their other crewmen. All dead. All by blaster fire. She didn’t need him to confirm that. She could see where the particle blasts had ripped through their clothes and spilled their entrails onto the plastic flooring.
“Careful not to step in any blood,” she ordered. She stood up and extracted herself from the mass of corpses.
“How are we going to get them back to the ship?” The cute security officer asked. He seemed to be asking no one in particular, but she answered.
“We aren’t.”
The doctor jerked his head toward her at that. “I need to do full autopsies—”
“But you won’t be able to do that. Take good field notes, doctor, because that’s all you’re going to get.”
“That’s not how we honor our dead,” Arnesson objected, a little sheepishly. He knew he was out of line, but she didn’t press it.
“I know, and I’m with you on that. But these are battlefield conditions. Any moment now, Authority detectives could come through that door. Nothing is stopping them. This place is no one’s jurisdiction. We’ve already got six dead Authority cops here. They’re not going to make friendly inquiries, especially after they do a retina scan and figure out who we are. We’ve got to get out of here. The best we can do is offer our dead a dignified disposal.” It would also offer the dead the advantage of not being identified by the Authority cops, either, but she didn’t say that. She didn’t think she needed to.
She pulled another weapon from her jacket, a phase disrupter. She checked to make sure it was fully charged. With luck, she’d have enough juice to send their bodies out of phase and into…wherever out-of-phase matter goes, she thought. Into the Mystery.
“Doctor, you’ve got five minutes to finish up. Then we need to get out of this place. If we’re not gone before the detectives arrive, we’re not getting out of here at all.”
“Come.” Admiral Jason Tal leaned back in his seat and rubbed the back of his neck.
Captain Daniel Hightower stepped through looking as grim as Tal felt.
“Let’s make this brief, can we, captain? I just received some…bad news.”
Hightower stood at parade rest in front of the Admiral’s desk.
“Sit, son. Bourbon?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” the captain said. “End of my duty shift, after all.”
“Good. It’s the start of mine. I don’t think this bottle is going to last the shift.”
Hightower didn’t laugh. Tal poured the whiskey into two antique tin cups. They’d once been part of soldiers’ mess kits in the early 20th century. The metallic taste of the tin ruined the bourbon, but Tal didn’t care. It wasn’t great whiskey to start with.
“Can I ask…?” Hightower started, but couldn’t seem to find the words to finish.
“It’s classified, but…let’s just say someone I was very close to got killed in the line of duty…earlier today…a long way from here. I loved her once.”
“I’m sorry sir.”
“I want to snap the bastard’s neck, whoever it was.”
“Read me in,” Hightower said.
“What?”
“Read me in. You have the authority. Read me in and I’ll snap the bastard’s neck for you.”
Tal considered this. It was tempting. He glanced at Hightower and suppressed a shudder. He was glad the captain was playing for his team. “Let me think about it.”
Hightower nodded. He knocked back his whiskey all at once. He didn’t even honor it with a grimace. “Did you see my report?”
“No, I…I guess I was a bit distracted.”
“Don’t blame you, sir.”
“It would be insubordination if you did.”
Hightower laughed. It was a harsh laugh, like saw blades on sandpaper. It made Tal’s skin crawl.
“Just give me the highlights,” the admiral commanded.
“You might need another drink.” He put the cup down on Tal’s desk. “I do.”
Tal raised his eyebrows and poured the captain a double. “This better be good.”
“Oh, it is.” Hightower took another swig. This time he grimaced, letting the sour mash run between his gums and teeth. “We ran across an unregistered vessel.”
“Unregistered? You mean RFC?”
“Nope. Not registered to them, either. Get this: It’s called the Kepler.”
“Your ship is the Kepler.”
“It’s another Kepler.”
Tal blinked. “But Kepler is a scientist from Earth.”
“Right.”
“Why would an alien name its vessel after a scientist from Earth?”
“It’s not an alien vessel.”
“But it’s not one of ours, and it’s not RFC.”
“Correct.”
“Was there a crew?”
“Yes. Human.”
Tal blinked. “I don’t understand. Your Kepler was appropriated from the old Colonial Science Corps for the war effort.”
“Correct.”
“So…we don’t allow more than one ship to have the same name. Just where is this ship registered?”
“As near as I can tell, Admiral, it’s a Colonial Science Corps vessel.”
“There are no Colonial Science Corps vessels. There’s no Colonial Science Corps.”
“There’s no Colonial Science Corps in this universe.”
Tal pursed his lips. Was Hightower playing with him? Yes, a little bit. That was clear. He was dancing around something big and was enjoying the guessing game. That was all right. Tal was enjoying it a bit himself. He’d had enough tragedy for one day. The puzzle was a good distraction. He smiled and took another drink of his bourbon. “Okay, Captain, I’ll play along. Who is the captain of this unregistered Kepler?”
“Captain Jeffrey Bowers.”
Tal frowned. “I know that name. Why do I know that name?”
“Twenty years ago, sir, you had to choose between two lieutenants to lead a top secret mission. You chose me, sir. ”
It all came rushing back. Tal set his cup down, suddenly feeling a little sick. “Catskill.” The word dropped off his tongue like an anvil.
“Yes, sir. Jeff Bowers was my best friend. He died on that mission.”
“I remember now.”
“I saw him die, sir. It’s…it’s why I snapped. It wasn’t in my orders to kill everyone in that village, as you know.” Hightower admitted this without a hint of remorse.
It made the hair stand up on Tal’s arm. “It earned you a reputation,” Tal said, not meeting the captain’s eyes.
“One that I hope I’ve put to good use.” Hightower grinned. Actually grinned.
Tal knocked back the rest of the whiskey in his cup.
“I’m through playing twenty questions, captain. Tell me what happened. The short version.” His mood had soured. Hightower was never company he cared to keep.
“It’s Jeff, all right. And several crew members of a contemporaneous Colonial
Defense Fleet—as if the war had never happened. They say they were testing a new teleportation technology and ended up in Authority space…on an adjacent reality string.”
“What string do they say they’re from?”
“String 310. They list us as String 311. I don’t know about that, sir—”
Tal nodded. “That’s right. 311 is our string. But we’ve never…it isn’t possible…” he trailed off, looking out the large window into space at the stationary stars, burning brighter than seemed natural to someone brought up planetside.
“They seem as surprised as we are. And get this, in their string, you picked him instead of me. In his universe, I died at Catskill.”
“And there was no war.”
Hightower cocked his head. “What do you mean, sir?”
I picked the wrong man all right, Tal thought. But he didn’t say it aloud.
Chapter Three
The chime rang out, indicating someone was at the door of Jeff’s cabin. The noise seemed distorted and loopy, bringing him from the depths of oblivion to the surface of consciousness—a place he had absolutely no interest in being. “Go away,” he called, not loud enough for anyone to hear. Just the volume he had been able to muster made his head ache. “Jesus Christ,” he said, cradling his head and turning over on his bunk.
Then came the knocking. Soft at first, then louder. Then insistent. “Jeff, I know you’re in there!” Emma’s voice, muffled, higher-pitched than usual, which meant anger or panic. Perhaps both.
“Go away!” Jeff yelled again, bracing himself against the pain.
“I’m not going away,” she called through the door. “You’ve been in there for days.”
“Go away,” Jeff repeated. She pounded on the door.
“Jesus!” he shouted, sitting up. His stomach leaped from all the whisky, and his face felt like it was on fire. His temples throbbed and a great burning pain the magnitude of the sun burned behind his eyes. “Ahhh!” he moaned.
“Let me in or I’ll find a janitor who will let me in anyway.”
Jeff continued to moan. This world’s Kepler had escorted their own Kepler back to Sol Station. It was, in every way he could discern, an exact replica of their own Sol Station. He knew his way around, and it felt familiar and comforting. His crew had been granted low-security detention status—which means they’d been granted free run of the space station, but their neurals were being closely monitored. It was house arrest…in a really big house.
Jeff glanced at a half-empty glass of whisky and knocked it back, hoping the hair of the dog would take the edge off his torment. He spoke, trying to keep his voice even and normal so the computer would recognize it. “Let her in,” he said. The door slid open.
Emma was there, but he didn’t look up at her face. He knew what he’d see, and didn’t really want to see it.
“You look like hell,” she said, stepping in and taking his only chair. The door whisked shut behind her.
He slumped down onto the bed again.
“And you’re naked,” she pointed out.
He looked down. “Huh,” he said. “I hadn’t noticed that.”
“And there’s a pool of vomit by your pants.”
“Ugh.” So that’s what that smell is, he thought as he lay back down. The new body given to him by the Ulim was supposed to be resilient. But he had never pushed it like he had been pushing it for the past several days.
“Jeff, you have to stop with the drinking. No amount of alcohol is going to change what happened…what we did.”
“What I did,” Jeff corrected her.
“What we did,” she insisted.
“It’s Catskill all over again.” Jeff rose and poured himself another scotch. He looked up at the small cache of dishes above his sink to see if there was a larger glass. There was. He looked at Emma. He thought better of it and just used the smaller glass he had.
She grabbed the bottle before he could pour her any. “I knew this was going to happen.”
“You knew what was going to happen?” Jeff asked.
“This.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Bullshit.” Emma wasn’t the kind of woman who bandied about profanity. It sounded alien and wrong dropping from her lips. “Jeff, ever since we docked at Sol Station, you’ve crawled into your hole—just like before, but worse.”
Jeff opened his mouth to protest, but she held up her hand. “Don’t even try to deny it. You’ve consumed more whisky in three days than you normally go through in a month. You’re sleeping all day. You’re irritable and sullen.”
“I’m just—” What was he going to say, “drunk”? He certainly was that.
“Shut up or I’ll punch you in the head,” Emma snapped. “You’re not ‘just’ anything. You’re depressed. And I’m not leaving until you accompany me to the infirmary.”
“Do you know what will happen if we go to the infirmary?”
“You might get some help? Maybe a dose of Plastaffex to help you manage your emotions—in a healthy way?”
“The doctor will want to do some routine scans and will discover that my fifty-year-old-body has the metabolism of a twenty-year-old. And it will be the whole can of shit we went through when I returned from the Ulim, all over again.”
Emma nodded, silent now. “You have been depressed.”
Jeff nodded. “Okay.” It was a concession. Of sorts. Sure.
“And it’s not Catskill.”
“Nope. It’s a billion times worse. A billion, billion times worse.” Jeff eyed the bottle in Emma’s hand. He was at the point of diminishing returns for the alcohol, and he knew it. It didn’t stop him from wanting it.
“Give me a glass, will you please?” Emma pointed toward the cupboard. “You’re scaring me—and you’re irritating the shit out of me.”
Jeff raised his eyebrows at yet another profanity. He shrugged and passed her a mug. “Always took you for a gin girl.”
She poured herself a couple of fingers. “I’m a white wine girl, thank you very much.”
Jeff sat on the edge of his bunk and rubbed his hands along his buzz cut hair. “Em, I…if you’re right, I just killed every person on Earth—not to mention every creature on every planet there is…was.”
“Trying to win a war against creatures that were systematically wiping out the human race. You…we didn’t do it on purpose. Science is filled with unintended consequences.”
“Edison burning his finger and what we did are hardly in the same category of ‘Oops.’”
Emma took a sip and made a face. “How can you stand this stuff?”
Jeff felt dizzy. He lay back down, arms spreadeagle. “Puts hair on your chest,” he managed.
“You want hair on my chest? Really?”
Jeff smiled sadly, but didn’t know if she could see it. It didn’t matter. They hadn’t made love since the accident. He couldn’t even summon any desire. Is that what I’m calling it now? he wondered. The accident?
“Jeff, we’re stuck here. There’s no home to go to.”
“If you’re trying to make me feel better—I don’t. I feel sick.”
“I’m trying to think things through. This is the only universe we’ve got. You’ve got to have a physical sometime. They’re going to find out you’re…altered.”
“Yeah. Okay. Sometime.”
“You need to get ahead of it.”
“What are you…what do you mean?”
“Talk to Admiral Jennings—”
“There is no Admiral Jennings. I checked. The Admiral here is Tal.”
Emma looked disturbed. “Do you know him?”
Jeff nodded. “He made me a captain. He sent me to Catskill.”
“Oh, Jeff,” she moved to his side and put her hand on his chest.
“But in this world, he chose Danny to lead that mission. Which is why I’m…dead here.” He swallowed. “So yeah, I know him.”
“Then go to him. Tell him…hell, tell him everything.”
“He’ll just want to use…” he was about to say “me” but after some hesitation, finished with a weak “it.”
“He might. And you’ll say no. And you’ll tell him that if you use it you risk destroying this universe too. He won’t allow that. He’s too smart.”
“He might. He’s an Admiral. He might try to force my hand.”
“What, by tying me to a railroad track and twirling his mustache?”
Despite himself, Jeff laughed. It hurt. “Oh, God, Emma…what have we done?”
She put the glass and the bottle on the counter and laid down next to him on the bed. She rested her head on his chest and hugged him to her. “The best we could, honey.”
She’d never used a term of endearment before. He put his arm around her and pulled her in closer. Without knowing where it came from, a sob erupted from his throat.
“That’s the best thing,” Emma said. “Let it out, baby.” She cradled his head into her belly and rocked back and forth as he wet her shirt.
Jo was deep in thought as the shuttle auto-docked with the Talon. She felt lost. She felt the gaping hole of loss in her belly. Not just the loss of the Captain and his away team, but personal loss…failure. She wracked her brain replaying the events that had led her to the present moment, every significant decision, every possible way she might have gone in a different direction or pushed things in a different direction. But Captain Telouse was not a man easily pushed, and her own responses had been by the book. She might, conceivably, have done something different, but it wouldn’t have made any sense in the moment to do it. She shook her head. She was already frazzled with grief, and now she was making herself crazy with all her second-guessing.
The shuttle set down lightly. She felt a barely perceptible bump as the shuttle’s skis kissed the floor of the landing bay. She’d have to make a full report to RFC command, and she’d have to hold it all together until they could rendezvous with a friendly space station and pick up their new captain. She felt unequal to the task. Her hands began to shake, and she squeezed them under her thighs to steady them.
With a whine of servomotors, the shuttle door swung up and clear of the entrance, and their restraints released. Dr. Mbusa avoided her eyes as he rose and headed first for the door. That meant one thing—the doctor was lost in his own thoughts and not really aware of what was happening around him. She decided not to call him on it. The security team followed protocol, however, and waited for her to disembark before them.