Black Box

by Ivan Turner

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Poulle said through a liar’s face.

  “Don’t insult me,” Beckett said through gritted teeth. “I expect better from you.”

  Now it was Poulle’s turn to growl. “You don’t get to expect anything from me, Captain Beckett. I’ve given you orders. Your only job, now is to say, yes, sir, and march your ass out the door.”

  Leaning forward, Beckett lowered his voice. “I’m not some dumb ass new officer, John. I know how you and your gang of crotchety dipshits work. Don’t tell me that you’ve stacked my crew and called me back four days early just to investigate something that’s already two hundred years old.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you, Ted.”

  Beckett drummed his fingers on the table. He’d already lost this battle, he knew. He could huff and puff, but his only two recourses were to accept the job or quit. Quitting was as much out of the question for him as was throwing him off the Force for them. The last ten years had been a standoff between Beckett and the Admiralty. They did their very best to make his life miserable and he did his very best to take it.

  “Can we at least get her off the list?”

  Knowing exactly who he meant, Poulle shook his head.

  “Whatever happened to the captain having the final say on his crew?”

  “Father knows best,” Poulle said, indicating a certain Admiral Tedesco.

  "I don't want some snot-nosed brat who got where she is by the brass on her father's shirt as my lieutenant."

  "I know.” Poulle’s tone of voice went uncommonly compassionate. “Believe me when I tell you, Ted, she doesn't want to be with you either. But we're sticking you both together and neither one of you gets a say. Let's not kid ourselves here, Ted. Shit rolls downhill and you’re as downhill as it gets. If you look at the manifest, all you've got are rookies and vets who can't get along with anyone else. Take Jack Tunsley there for instance…"

  "Jack's a good officer."

  "He’s a lousy officer, but he's a good engineer. And a son of a bitch. He was chief on four ships before they finally stuck him with you."

  "And I’m glad to have him."

  "Because you like a son of a bitch. Rodrigo's fifty eight years old and she's been a sergeant since before you signed up."

  Beckett slammed his fist down on the table again, this time so hard that Poulle jumped up out of his seat. They could insult him and give him the crappy missions, but when it came to his crew, Beckett knew what was best and no one was going to contest that. Using Rodrigo against him was a dirty trick and Poulle knew it.

  "I've trusted Rodrigo with my life a dozen times over and she's never let me down. She was my sergeant when I was a grunt, and she’s still a sergeant because there’s no one who will ever be better at it. Tunsley can build a spaceship with bamboo shoots and cardboard. These are the best people in the UESF and if the Admiralty is too fucking stupid to realize it then the hell with them!"

  Regaining his composure, Poulle straightened his uniform shirt. The conversation was over. “You leave in twenty four hours.”

  Boone

  William Boone was widely regarded as one of the worst officers in the fleet. If you asked anyone around how he had gotten to be an officer in the first place, let alone fifth in the chain of command aboard the Valor, no one would have an answer for you. The truth was that Boone wasn’t a stupid man. He was less than competent, which didn’t make him incompetent. He was a bit on the casual side without actually being lazy. He’d had infantry chosen for him as a specialty rather than having chosen it himself. All appeared to be strikes against him, but he didn’t present too terribly on paper. That, with a bit of good fortune, had allowed him to climb up the ladder to a position that should have held some relative prestige but didn’t necessarily do so. Instead, it had landed him on the Valor with superiors that didn’t regard him and subordinates that didn’t respect him.

  At this point in his career, Boone was satisfied with his rank. He was forty six years old and being fifth in command was good enough for him. Even he knew that command of a ship was very rightly out of his reach. Though he’d never had to run a scenario with no one pulling the strings above, he knew himself well enough to be sure that he was not cut out for that kind of responsibility. Being fifth on the totem pole kind of assured him of always having someone to lean on. But that knowledge didn’t necessarily help him sleep at night. It was a frustrating life for William Boone. In his youth he hadn’t understood the consequences of his behavior and now it seemed too late to do anything about it. His reputation followed him around like a black cat. The collection of personalities on the Valor only made it worse. And it all started with the captain.

  Ask most people who’d served under Beckett and they would tell you he was a strong captain with good instincts. That didn’t necessarily make him a good skipper. He was short tempered and generally surly. If you looked at him cross eyed, he never forgot. Three years before, William Boone had boarded the Valor wearing his service record like a fool's costume. Beckett had sized him up in an instant. From then on it had been a nightmare. It didn’t help that his immediate subordinate, the sergeant on board, was Anabelle Rodrigo. Her exploits were legendary. Her relationship with the captain was infamous. Beckett relied on her as much as himself. She could do no wrong. Though Boone outranked her, she was his superior in the captain’s eyes. For three years he had been putting up with it. Despite the fact that she wasn’t an officer, Rodrigo was included in staff meetings. Her opinion always carried more weight than Boone’s. It had gotten to the point that Beckett rarely even looked to Boone. He was nothing more than a warm body to fill the gap. And, in many ways, that suited the captain and the sergeant very well. Because of her lack of skill with any technical equipment, Rodrigo was unpromotable. She would be a sergeant for the remainder of her career, never to move up and never to be displaced. For her to have any additional authority, she needed both a captain who respected her and an infantry officer who deferred. In Beckett and Boone she had the ideal situation.

  But Boone was tired of it. Maybe it was his age or maybe it was the exercise in futility that was his life. Maybe it was just that three years was a long time to be constantly reminded just how much of a nobody he was. He was not fool enough to think he could unseat the sergeant in the eyes of their captain. He was not fool enough to think that he would ever make any headway aboard the Valor. He needed to get off.

  Transfer requests were easy to file. But getting them granted was nigh impossible without a good reason. It helped if there was someone out there who wanted you on his or her ship. Boone’s reason wouldn’t wash and he knew that no one wanted him. If he was going to get off the Valor it was going to take time, patience, and skill. He was running out of the first two and he had never been long on the last. So he had spent his last three weeks of leave studying the Valor and the other ships of the fleet. He had buried his nose in historical scenarios and run simulation after simulation. He’d barely spent a moment with his elderly parents. He hadn’t even seen his daughter, which probably made her mother ecstatic.

  Boone did not like to refer to his ex-wife as a whoring bitch, which she most certainly was, but he did like to refer to her as his ex-wife, which she most certainly was not. The truth was, though they had lived together during the nine months of her pregnancy and the first two months of his daughter’s life, he had never gotten around to marrying her. He had wanted to, but it just hadn’t happened. Instead, while she’d been screwing around on the side, he’d been working two jobs at two separate and competing fast food restaurants. The jobs had been menial and his bosses had been demeaning, but he had tolerated it because, though he was an educated man, he didn’t know how to do better for himself. He had been fired from one job two weeks after being fired from the other. It had been a horrible time for him, a time when he had learned his own value, or lack thereof. His ex-wife’s affairs, which she had carried on throughout her pregnancy with men who were into that
sort of thing, became well known. He lost the deposit on the cheap ring he’d planned on buying her. Worst of all, he realized that he was unable to make anything of himself in the real world. In his mind, that left him with two options. Suicide or the military.

  Interestingly enough, Boone tried suicide. He failed at that, too. Spectacularly. He swallowed a bottle of pills, called no one for help because he was serious about it, and lay down to sleep forever. He did manage to doze, then woke up as his body rejected the pills. In the end, he spent two days at home, dizzy and throwing up. No one checked on him in that time. No one cared. So he joined the military.

  Now he was back aboard the Valor. He had arrived eighteen hours early when the only people on board were the base technicians and the crew chief. The chief had greeted him perfunctorily and then left him to himself. To not be noticed by the chief of the Valor was the crowning achievement in Boone's career of anonymity. Rumple Hardy had a reputation for knowing things about the crew that they didn’t even know about themselves. It was rumored that he would stake out the home of a person who had been transferred to the Valor. Boone remembered nothing of the sort when he’d gotten his transfer, though he’d undergone an extensive interview. Now he was part of the scenery. So much the better. He knew what he had to do in order to get himself off of that tub and he didn’t need the chief breathing down his neck while he did it.

  Detouring only long enough to drop his stuff off in the quarters he shared with two other officers, he headed straight for the hangar deck.

  Tedesco

  Despite her reputation and all of the things she did to perpetuate that reputation, Lara Tedesco was a bundle of nerves in the hours before she needed to board the Valor. She was barely twenty four years old. By all standards she was a baby, nothing more than a rookie with a family history protecting her. But she had made lieutenant, the stepping stone to officer, in record time. The papers that detailed her career in the service were spotless and impressive. Yet the truth was well known.

  Tedesco had never wanted to join the service. As a child she had been distracted, known to escape to a world of fantasy at every opportunity. Since the age of six, she had been putting a finger to the keyboard, writing stories and poems and even a few songs, though her ability to weave a tune was awful. She continued this way right up through high school. At fourteen she was without direction. Her grades were poor, some failing. She had few friends and the ones she had were questionable both as people and as loyal friends. She had experimented with a few light drugs and successfully battled and hidden an alcohol problem before her sixteenth birthday.

  She was a mess.

  Her mother, the late Mrs. Admiral Champion Tedesco (yes, her father’s given name was Champion), had buried her head in the sand. In her eyes, Lara was always a perfect little girl and if she had a bit of Alice in her that was okay. The Admiral was often absent and always disinterested. She was reasonably sure that he’d given his wife a child just so that she would have something to do while he pursued his career. Lara was never sure why he had even married in the first place. Her mother had died when she was eighteen, a senior in high school. At that point, the Admiral had stepped in to take stock of the situation. The outlook was bleak. Lara was failing some classes. She was clean of narcotics, mostly, but she was still without direction. She had three hard drives filled with literature and poetry that she herself had written. The better part of it was nonsense, but there was some good stuff in there as well and it was representative of her creative spirit.

  It was all useless in the eyes of her father. College wasn’t on the horizon. In fact, she would have to take three more summer school classes at the end of her senior year just to graduate high school. He wanted her to have that degree so he allowed it. Beyond that, her life was no longer her own. He forced her to enlist in the Space Force, telling her that she was on her own otherwise. Initially the argument was a week long marathon. Even afterwards, throughout that last summer, it came up now and again. She insisted that forcing her into the military was a bad idea. She’d wind up in infantry and flunk out of that, too. Or worse. But Champion Tedesco had assured her that her future in the service would be set from the get go. She would get the right teachers, receive the right grades, and climb the ladder of promotion quickly. It was their shared goal to get her out of space and behind a desk where she could coast through her career. That meant promotions. It also meant the fast track specialty, which was Navigation.

  As it turns out, Tedesco was a fair pilot. She’d found a niche in programming the machines. There was a creative angle to it that appealed to her. If only that had been all she needed. Her work in many of her classes was as poor as or worse than high school. Most of her instructors owed the Admiral a favor and so inflated her grades but there were a couple who wouldn’t. The Admiral had chosen to move her to different classes or have her retake them in that case. It actually took her an extra semester to graduate, but no one noticed because she went at night so that she wouldn’t fall behind her peers.

  Her father had had her placed on a ship immediately. She was put on the Courage as a noncom navigator. It should have been an easy gig. With a doctor as the captain, the Courage was never sent on military missions. It was all about helping people so her job consisted entirely of orbits, landings, takeoffs, and wormhole jumps. Basic stuff. But the captain didn’t like her. She served for a year under Abigail Ventana, trying to do her job, but failing just the same. Still Captain Ventana knew better than to rock the boat. Admiral Tedesco had asked that his daughter’s service record show exemplary work and point in the direction of quick promotion to lieutenant. In exchange, he promised that Lara would be lieutenant for someone else. That was good enough for Ventana.

  As relieved as Lara was to be off the Courage, she knew that the Valor was no place for her. It did not fit into the plan her father and she had laid out. But plans change. When her father had come to her and told her that she would be transferred and where, she wondered if she had finally screwed up enough to be consigned to the depths of the Force. She considered quitting. But the Admiral had assured her that this was not a reflection on her performance. It was a temporary side trip. He explained to her her duty and she had accepted it because there was nothing else she could do. Perhaps when she had completed her way into the upper ranks of the military and secured a planetside position she could go back to writing. It gave her career a purpose.

  Sometimes, to Lara Tedesco, life seemed pretty empty.

  Rodrigo

  As a child, Anabelle Rodrigo had been one of those beautiful little girls that mothers fawn over. She wore pretty dresses and makeup and had the boys going wild as early as primary school. She remembered liking the girly girl phase. She had always enjoyed being beautiful. It instilled confidence in her and the attention was flattering. When she got to high school she began to date, picking and choosing her boys at will. There was no one who didn’t want a date with Anabelle Rodrigo.

  Rodrigo wasn’t a particularly smart girl, at least not from an academic standpoint. Her grades were low. She had little interest in school. She always had a knack for assessing a physical situation, though. She was athletic, excelling in physical education. There was almost nothing she couldn’t do on the first try. She could also strategize as well as anyone she knew. She was a marvel at chess. Like Lara Tedesco, however, she had little direction. She always assumed she’d eventually choose the richest, most handsome man and marry him. She would be comfortable and set up and being married wouldn’t do anything to dull her social life. It was her intention to take advantage of those who wished it. And there were plenty of those out there.

  But at age sixteen, something happened to change her whole outlook. There was a boy who pursued her relentlessly. He was cute and he was smart and she liked him, but she didn’t feel that he was deferential enough in his approach so she gave him a hard time. Ultimately, he got the picture and gave her what she wanted. Smiling ear to ear, she gave him a date.

&nbs
p; She couldn’t even remember his name.

  They went out one Saturday night. He took her to a nice dinner and then a fancy place for dessert. He spent a lot of money that night, money she didn’t know he had. At sixteen, she was wondering if she had stumbled upon her rich husband prematurely. But there was that underlying attitude, the attitude that bespoke of confidence, even in the presence of great beauty. She didn’t like it and he didn’t care for hers. It put them right at odds.

  As the night wore on, they became more and more antagonistic toward each other until she told him that he needed to take her home. He growled a response and they drove off. But he didn’t take her home. She knew then what he was about and steeled herself against it. She was not afraid. The scenery around them went from suburban to secluded to desolate. She wondered if he had brought girls out there before. Once or twice, she tried to question him, but he said it was a shortcut.

  When he finally pulled the car over, they were miles from anywhere. Inside the car it was cramped and the air was stale. He turned to her with that look in his eye and told her in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t as great as she thought she was and he intended to see to it that she understood it. Rodrigo let her eyes go wide, allowed her pupils to dilate. There may have even been a tear. It was a poor act. If the boy (she really couldn’t remember his name) had had any sense of his own, he would have realized it. But he outweighed her and he had about four inches on her so he was pretty confident. There also wasn’t a drop of blood left in his brain so he wasn’t thinking particularly clearly.

  Anabelle Rodrigo was as much a girl as any one person could be. She’d never had a physical confrontation, never had to defend herself against another person. But her tactical skills went into play as he moved in. She assessed the situation expertly and made her move without hesitation. Before his fingertips could touch her he was gagging and gasping for air. A second blow to his nose, delivered with the palm, brought blood. Calmly, she got out on her side of the car and walked around to his side. She opened the door and grabbed him by his well combed hair. She didn’t have to pull hard; she could never have forced him out of the car. He came on his own because he knew that she’d yank out his hair if he didn’t. At that point, he tried to grab an advantage but she was ready for him. First she scarred his face, a small reminder of what happens to a man when he tries to rape Anabelle Rodriguez. Then she’d made him less of a man, a grand reminder that would remain with him throughout his life. When she was done with him, he was not the same boy. Not physically. Not emotionally. And he never would be.