by Jake Elwood
Tom and O'Reilly were wrapping up the inspection tour when Tom saw a couple of spacers exiting the detention wing with a pair of prisoners between them. The prisoners were a man and a woman with the crisp posture and haughty demeanour of Dawn Alliance officers. Tom gestured to O'Reilly and they waited as the prisoners and their guards approached.
“What's this?” said Tom.
A young woman gave him a quick salute. “Prisoner transfer. We're putting the high-ranking officers in the proper brig.” She gestured at the man beside her. “Hendrix says that way they can't organize a revolt.”
Tom looked the prisoners up and down. Their uniforms were rumpled and they had bags under their eyes, but there was no air of defeat to them. By their rank markings the woman was a Division Leader, probably the captain of the ship. The man’s rank was Secondary Division Leader. Both of them stared at him like he was a roach that had scuttled into their path.
Tom glanced at O'Reilly. “We haven't seen the brig yet. We’ll go with you.”
The six of them climbed a ladder to the deck above, then walked starboard and aft. A couple of spacers came through the hatch ahead of them, followed by three men and a woman in baggy gray uniforms. The woman started to raise a hand in greeting, then froze, her expression turning sick.
“Well, well,” said the Division Leader, curling her lip. “What do we have here? Some traitors?”
Tom swore under his breath. O'Reilly gave him a puzzled look.
Tom turned to the guards accompanying the officers. “Carry on.” He stepped aside, and O’Reilly joined him. The guards continued down the corridor with their prisoners. The two groups passed each other, the four figures in gray staring, stony-faced, at the Dawn Alliance officers.
The officers and their escorts passed through a hatch and out of sight. Tom held up a hand, stopping the others as they reached him.
O'Reilly said, “What's going on? You look like you just found a dead rat in the water supply.”
“Captain O'Reilly,” Tom said. “I'd like you to meet Gabrielle, Franz, Jonas, and David. They served on Tanker T495, which we captured on one of our first raids. Since then, they've done everything in their power to help us.”
He didn't add that, in return, the Free Neorome Navy had locked them up, interrogated them, and treated them like enemies.
“I'm pleased to meet you,” said Gabrielle. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “I'm a lot less happy to run into them.” She had a lilting accent, quite different from the usual Dawn Alliance soldiers. She and her shipmates were from Enkidu. Her world was part of the Alliance, but she considered it an enemy occupation rather than a true partnership.
“I think she recognized you,” said Tom.
Gabrielle made a face. “We took political indoctrination classes when the war broke out. She was an instructor.” She shook her head. “I can't go back to Enkidu now. They'll hang me for a traitor.”
“You won't have to go back,” said Tom.
Gabrielle lifted a skeptical eyebrow. She knew as well as he did that he didn't have the power to keep a promise like that. Most of Free Neorome saw her as an enemy. There was an excellent chance she would be deported when the war ended.
And then she would die for helping them.
“I don't suppose you could shoot her?” Gabrielle said. “Before she has a chance to talk to anyone else?”
Tom said, “I genuinely wish I could.”
Chapter 6
The captain's cabin wouldn't have seemed like much groundside, but by shipboard standards it was palatial. There was a bedroom, a private bathroom, and a meeting room complete with half a dozen chairs and a smart table. It all seemed wildly extravagant, and Tom felt embarrassed to move in.
But the ship was huge, and the Free Neorome crew was tiny. The meeting room was undeniably useful, and he was the captain, after all. And it would be absurd to leave the cabin vacant.
So he emptied one drawer of the bureau beside the bed and put away his toiletries and spare uniform. Then he stretched out on the bed.
Sleep eluded him, which was no surprise. He didn't want to think about how many hours he'd been awake, but his mind continued to race.
He rose, went to the drawer he'd appropriated, and took out a small metal case. The case contained an igniter, a small pouch of dried sage leaves, and a single feather just longer than his index finger. He'd found the feather just outside of Panama City. He figured it came from a crow or a raven. He wished for an eagle feather, but he wasn't sure there was an eagle closer than Earth.
As he arranged the leaves in a tidy pile in the bottom of the tin, he murmured an apology to no one in particular. He should have had sage sticks rather than leaves, and some cedar as well. A ship of war was hardly an appropriate place for smudging, for that matter. But his parents had always told him that it was the intent that was important, not the details. A handful of sage leaves and a crow's feather was the best he could do, so it would suffice.
For a time he sat with the igniter in his hand, breathing deeply, settling his mind. There were a thousand administrative tasks waiting for his attention, and a yammering voice in the back of his head said that he needed to attend to every single one. This mission, after all, was crucially important. Lives were at stake, not just everyone on the ship but people across the Green Zone as well.
He thought of Gabrielle. He'd ordered that she and her shipmates be given the run of the battleship, with no restrictions and no surveillance. After all, the tanker crew was stuck with the Free Neorome Navy now. Their lives depended on a victory by the colonists and the United Worlds.
Unless she ingratiated herself with the Dawn Alliance by sabotaging the ship.
Tom pushed away the insidious thought. We've done enough harm to Gabrielle and her people. I won't be the cause of more damage, more injustice.
I will do no harm that I can avoid.
That, he realized, was the question at the heart of his unease. There was no course of action open to him where he did no harm. Disaster waited on every side. Every victory, every success, was a disaster for someone. To do nothing would be a hideous betrayal of everyone who depended on him. He had to act. It was just that simple.
But where to draw the line? When did mercy become foolishness? Where did pragmatism end and savagery begin?
This is not a question with a straightforward answer. It's a tightrope I have to walk and to keep walking. All I can do is approach it with as much balance as I can muster.
Balance. I need to set aside anger and frustration and fear so that I can find balance.
He opened his eyes. He'd never done a smudge by himself before. Always there had been others. His parents, the elders of the reservation. A circle of lined and solemn faces to lend gravity to the ceremony.
The details don't matter. My intentions matter.
He pressed the top of the igniter and lit the sage leaves. A fat tendril of smoke rose, sweet and acrid, and he picked up the feather. He leaned over the tin, using the feather to waft smoke into his face.
The smell was not the same as he remembered. This wasn't Earth-grown sage. Still, it was essentially the same. It triggered a wave of memory so vivid that he looked around, half expecting to see his parents and aunts and uncles around him.
He set the feather down and placed his hands in the smoke. He made a washing motion, and imagined himself scrubbing away the fear, the doubt, everything that clouded his judgement and impeded his wisdom.
I have to get this right. So much is depending on me. Fear twisted his stomach, so he took up the feather again. He wafted smoke toward his belly and imagined the fear dissolving and drifting away.
His pulse slowed, and the anxious knot in his stomach loosened.
My people have dealt with much worse than this. They gathered together and burned sage and cedar and sought the wisdom to deal with calamities far greater than this. And when they couldn't gather together, they did smudging on their own. I'm not truly alone. I'm at the end of the chain
that stretches back to before humanity left the Earth. All those Cree are with me in spirit. They can't save me from this tightrope I must walk, but they can help me find my balance.
She called it the mystery room.
The little room was almost in the exact center of the ship. Important-looking consoles lined one wall, but no one had yet figured out what they did. Several fat pipes rose from the floor, ran past the consoles, and vanished through the forward bulkhead. The consoles seems to have something to do with the pipes, but the contents of the pipes were just as much of a secret.
Alice liked the mystery room because it was centrally located and it had a small table with comfortable chairs. She sat on one of those chairs, with her injured foot propped up on another. She was supposed to keep her weight off it as much as possible, and to keep it elevated.
The woman filling the role of ship's surgeon, knowing that raider crews tended to be stubborn, had encouraged her to keep off the foot by reducing her pain medication and refusing to put a protective hard shell on the foot. Walking was painful enough that Alice had grudgingly accepted reduced duties.
The rush of feet in the corridor outside caught her attention and she turned to look over her shoulder. A group of spacers ran past, nine or ten men and women carrying bulky toolboxes. The tallest Chinese man she'd ever seen brought up the rear, a bunch of fusion bars over one shoulder. That meant it was the crew of the Snow Melt, a passenger ship that had never taken up arms against the United Worlds. They hadn't done anything to annoy the Dawn Alliance, either, but the DA had confiscated their ship anyway.
Well, they'd volunteered for the assault on Novograd, which stood an excellent chance of being suicidal. She figured that made up for any lack of enthusiasm from before.
She checked her glove, just in case this was a real emergency. It was just the latest in an endless series of drills, however. A hundred and some people, most of whom had never even seen a battleship from the outside, had to fight a desperate battle in a few days’ time. The training would be non-stop.
Feeling simultaneously guilty and smug that she was idle, Alice leaned back in her chair, wiggled the toes of her injured foot, and tapped the tabletop. The surface came awake, and she browsed for news feeds mentioning Novograd. She was pleasantly surprised to find a Press Alliance feed with uncensored data less than two weeks old.
A surprising amount of information was finding its way off the planet, but most of the news was bad. Factories all over the northern continent were being retooled to make munitions for the Dawn Alliance. Some of the conversions were simple. A vehicle manufacturer was already producing armored personnel carriers. A shipyard in Sibirsk, on the other hand, wasn’t expected to turn out its first corvette for at least six months.
There was resistance, of course, and the news on that front was either inspiring or grim, depending on your point of view. Guerillas were raiding factories and ambushing convoys, spreading chaos and destruction across the continent. The invaders were responding with savage crackdowns. Still, if they squeezed too hard they would only drive more people into the ranks of the resistance. There were reprisals against civilians, but on a comparatively small scale.
She found a propaganda clip, an announcement from the DA Security Bureau of a huge reward for the capture or killing of a terrorist named Karen Sharpe. She was, apparently, a holy terror, spreading carnage and destruction through the lake country.
Alice closed the propaganda vid and searched for Karen Sharpe in the rest of the feed. According to the Press Alliance she was the most prominent resistance leader on Novograd. She was becoming a folk hero.
There was a photo of her, taken before the war. She looked utterly ordinary, a woman in her thirties with blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, grinning at the camera. She didn’t look like a legend, but that was exactly what she was becoming.
Alice looked at the picture, returning the grin, proud of her fellow colonist. I’m going to have to look you up when we get to Novograd. Keep fighting. Keep enduring. Help is on the way.
After a while she blanked the screen and dug a deck of cards out of her pocket. She shuffled, letting her fingers do the work as her mind wandered.
The deck plates rumbled beneath her, setting off a vibration that she felt in her breastbone. She made a mental note to find out what machinery lay beneath her feet. It didn't actually matter to her, but she was a spacer and an engineer. She could no more help being curious about the hardware around her than she could help breathing.
“Ho, Alice.” A heavyset black man came through the doorway. “Don't get up.”
“Oh, Jacques,” she said. Jacques’s family had come out to Tazenda when he was a small child, and he retained an Earth accent. French, she thought, but she wasn't sure. Languages other than English barely existed in the colonies, outside of Sigma and New Rhineland, where people spoke Ndebele.
Jacques dropped to a squat behind her, pressing thick thumbs against the deck plates. Alice watched, wondering what he was doing.
A narrow strip of metal popped up, and Jacques grunted as he lifted a section of deck plate. A metal chain clattered past underneath, the noise surprisingly loud. The volume faded as the chain slowed and then stopped.
In a channel no bigger around than her forearm, fat cartridges lay end-to-end. Each bullet was the size of a large cigar.
Is this room for ammunition inspection? Alice dismissed the idea. The hatch let Jacques see the ammo delivery chain, but he couldn't have removed a round to inspect it. Not easily, anyway.
“I’m at Delta,” Jacques said into a bracer on his wrist. “Everything looks good here.”
A muffled acknowledgement came from his bracer, and he closed the deck plate. “It's too loud,” he said to Alice as he straightened up. “Something's misaligned. It'll cause a problem sooner or later.”
That made her chuckle. It was a captured ship on a doomed mission. “Sooner or later” was irrelevant.
“How's the foot?”
“Just a scratch,” said Alice. “Don't tell anyone.” In fact she had a strip of polymer replacing a section of one metatarsal, and some muscle damage she would never fully recover from, but Jacques didn’t need to know that.
Jacques grinned, laid a finger alongside his nose, and hurried out.
She remembered Tom ordering people into the ammo supply tunnels during the takeover of the ship, and shuddered. The delivery system for large shells had to be a good deal bigger than the narrow channel under the deck beneath her, but still, it must have been appallingly claustrophobic.
There were stories circulating about the commodore, claims that he had been kicked out of Battleship School for using ammunition tunnels and cargo elevators and other such unconventional routes during training. She smiled, amused by the thought of the always-serious leader breaking rules and being reprimanded. It was difficult to picture him as a nonconformist, as an unconventional rebel unable to fit in.
Still, he was different from every other United Worlds officer she had met.
“Working hard, I see.”
Alice looked over her shoulder. Two people stood in the doorway, a familiar stocky young man and a young woman with a shaved head. They kissed, and the woman turned to leave. The man caught her with an arm around the waist, pulled her back, and kissed her once more. She nestled her head against his chest for a moment, then broke away.
“You've been busy, Bridger.” Alice smiled. “And not with drills, either.”
Bridger swaggered around the table and dropped into a chair across from her. “The old me,” he said, his face shining with virtue, “would have made an inappropriate joke about drilling. I've matured, though. I'm above that sort of thing.”
Alice laughed. “Is that Elizabeth, what's her name? Larson? From New Panama?”
“That's exactly who she is.” Bridger beamed. She'd never seen him looking so pleased with himself.
“Congratulations, I guess. But hasn't anyone told her about you?”
“Lies,
” he said, waving a hand. “She can see right through the slander that's being spread by my jealous inferiors.”
“Well, I admire her courage, if not her good taste.”
Bridger laughed, did his best to look hurt, then gave up. “Deal the cards. I don't know how long I've got before they hit me with another drill.”
She dealt, then brought up a tally program on her glove. Bridger set a data pad on the table. “Looks like I'm up almost a hundred points.”
“But now you're in love,” Alice said. “You're distracted. I'll be all caught up in no time.”
He drew a card, spent a moment considering, then discarded a five of hearts. Alice took the five, did a quick calculation of probabilities, and discarded the queen of diamonds.
Bridger's eyebrows rose. “You're throwing away a queen? This day keeps getting better and better.” He drummed his fingers on the table, started to reach for the discarded queen, then drew from the top of the deck instead. “Oh, hell.” He laid the new card on top of the discarded queen.
“Come to mama,” Alice said, taking his discard and replacing it with a card from her hand. “It's good to see you happy.” She smirked. “It helps me feel better about the way I'm going to crush you.”
“In your dreams.” He drew and discarded. “It's nice, though.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“Being with Liz,” he said. “Thinking about good things for a change. The future. Or just ways to make her happy.” He was smiling so hard it looked like he was going to dislocate his cheekbone. “I highly recommend it. Being in love, that is. Being in a relationship.” His gaze sharpened a bit as he looked at her. “You should try it.”
Alice made a rude noise.
“You know, I always thought you and the commodore would make a good match.”