by Ramy Vance
“So if you’re not working, then you don’t need the protein,” Kurt said, his voice rising above the uneasy murmurs as he glared at Gavin. “So save it for the men fighting to keep the fleet in one piece. It’s all shit. It’s all going to shit since we lost Tribe Six and it’s not going to get better. So I don’t want to hear you whining about your lazy daddy missing one day’s pay!”
There was the slam of metal on metal as Gavin surged to his feet, knocking over his chair.
“Come on now,” Petra said, holding up placating hands. “Settle down—”
“You keep his name out of your mouth,” Gavin snarled at Kurt as his hands balled into fists. “You don’t get to talk about my pops like that.”
Petra reached to the computer interface on the wall and slammed the emergency call button, but it was too late. By the time the on-duty Youth Security officers reached the conference room, six of the kids were on Kurt, holding him back as Gavin writhed on the floor, sobbing and bleeding through a broken nose.
“This happens all the time,” the officer told Petra as his partner hauled a defeated Kurt out of the conference room in cuffs. “Teenage boys, you know. Always getting into fights.” He rolled his eyes. “The rest of you okay?”
“My kids are fine,” Petra murmured, staring after Kurt’s hulking figure as he disappeared up the hallway. “What’s gonna happen?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about him. A docked meal, a couple of hours of community service, at the worst. If we locked up every kid who got into a schoolyard fight, this fleet would be run by nothing but droids.” He offered a hand out to Gavin, whose nose had swollen to the size of a softball. “Come on, kid. I’ll walk you up to the infirmary.”
Petra thanked the officer numbly as they walked away. She turned to see a pale ring of faces staring back at her.
“I think that’s all for today,” she said.
None of the remaining kids moved except to cast each other uneasy looks. Some silent message passed among them, and as if they had elected her by secret, telepathic ballot, Franny cleared her throat.
“Was Kurt right, Petie?” she asked softly. “Is it…is it all going to fall apart?”
Kurt’s being dramatic, Petra wanted to say. You know how he gets.
Don’t worry, Franny, she wanted to say. We got a long, long way to go, yet, and we’ll get there. Believe you me. We’ll get there.
By the time she worked up the nerve to lick her lips, swallow, and open her mouth to answer, she saw by the bleak looks on their faces that it was too late.
Her silence had been answer enough.
It might’ve been the wee hours of the morning, but the fleet never slept. The shuttles never stopped their endless back-and-forth between freighters. The hustle and bustle of claustrophobia and life never faded to less than a dull background roar.
The corridor swayed beneath Petra’s feet as she trudged to the squad barracks. A few passing soldiers and officers gave her a wide berth as she staggered down the Reliant’s back corridors, but—well, fuck ‘em. She didn’t have to be on duty again for another twenty-seven hours. That was plenty of time to nurse a hangover.
Besides.
It had been one hell of a day, topping off one hell of a week, coming on the tail end of one hell of a year. That was the capstone of one hell of a life. If she wanted to burn her day off, and her ration allotment, on synth-whiskey and dime games of Texas Hold ‘Em, that was her God-given right.
She wondered if Dolly had any more spare aspirin.
Only a few more meters to the barracks, where she could collapse into her bunk. She would have stumbled past the shadowy figure leaning against the bulkhead wall without a second glance if he hadn’t stirred suddenly.
“Whoa!” Petra jumped, then staggered into a support strut, gripping it for support. She laughed, a little hysterical. “You can’t just jump out at me like that! You gotta be careful!”
Then her vision stopped swimming, and she recognized the loose top button, the round, boyish face.
“Sorry about that, Miss Potlova.” MP Lieutenant Bryce sounded genuinely apologetic. Two more men in MP uniforms stepped out of the barracks behind him as he flashed his ID badge. “Do you have a few minutes? We’d like to ask you a few questions about Sarah Jaeger.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jaeger stared at the x-ray screen. She couldn’t breathe.
Something moved on the other side of the glass. Art, laying on a medical gurney to make for easier scanning, turned his head and stared at her. His mandibles clicked slowly. She thought the poor, exhausted fellow might be trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t bring herself to activate the speaker and talk to him. She needed to collect herself.
She forced herself to look away from her little friend and face the scanner screen. “Is there a way to get them out?” she whispered.
“Presumably,” Virgil said. “Presumably, they’ll come out on their own.”
She winced at the utter mercilessness in the AI’s voice. “No,” she whispered, staring at the scan of Art’s thorax and the dense cluster of ghostly K’tax eggs planted between his strange, alien organs. The med-bay scanners had decreed the same terminal diagnosis for all of the rescued Locauri. There wasn’t a single one among them who wasn’t carrying at least a dozen of the parasite eggs.
She swallowed hard. “They won’t. If we don’t do anything, one of those eggs is going to hatch. It’s going to slaughter the others like shark pups in the womb. Then it’s going to eat Art alive.”
She rested her face in her hands and sagged, with the weight of the world falling new and heavy on her shoulders. The good news—the only scrap of hope she could cling to in this situation—was that the eggs were very small. Maybe they had some time before the K’tax would start to hatch.
“Doctors,” she mumbled. “Do any of the crew have advanced medical training?”
She knew the answer before Virgil gave it. “No. Aquila and Portia have basic field medic training. You activated warriors, not surgeons.”
“Why can’t we be both?” Jaeger wondered. “Why are they either warriors or healers?” Her hand tightened around her drink bottle until her fingers grew cold. Her left arm was in a sling against her chest, protecting her broken wrist as it healed.
Virgil had no answer for her.
“Have the Overseers responded to my messages?” she asked, not quite daring to hope.
“Nothing in the twenty minutes since you last asked.”
Jaeger gritted her teeth. Of course, they would dawdle when it came to answering her calls now when the clock was ticking for their little cousins.
“Well, send the message again,” she said. “Keep sending it every twenty minutes until they respond. They can’t ignore me forever. I want you to go through our embryo files,” she added. “I want you to pull up the best doctor, surgeon, and xenobiologist we have. And I want you to activate them.”
“Really?” Virgil sounded curious. “That will put you above the twenty-crew limit the Overseers placed on you.”
Jaeger ground her jaw until her temples hurt. “I know. I always intended to have them activated. Just not so soon. Now I don’t care. I didn’t pull the Locauri out of that frozen hellhole to watch them die.”
She pushed herself away from the scanner screen and stood. She couldn’t stand to look at it anymore.
Occy was waiting for her in the corridor. Dark bags hung beneath his eyes. She would swear his hair was lighter than it had been two days ago. Baby snoozed a few paces behind him and stirred as the med bay door slid shut.
“Hey.” She slipped an arm over Occy’s shoulder and turned him toward No-A. At first, he hesitated, then he fell into step beside her as she walked down the Osprey’s port wing. Baby, forever inscrutable when she wasn’t actively growling or purring, bobbed along behind them. “You haven’t been eating,” Jaeger said, gently reprimanding as she felt Occy’s collar bone slicing like a knife out of his shoulder.
Occy s
hrugged. Even his tentacles, normally big and active in the zero-g sectors of the ship, trailed listlessly behind him. He was wearing the navy blue dress uniform of a chief engineer, although they’d had to make several modifications to the standard pattern to account for his unusually small frame—and unusually overgrown shoulder-bud.
“I don’t want to go,” Occy whispered as they turned up the final corridor to No-A.
Jaeger squeezed his shoulder. “Me, either.”
The double doors to No-A slid open, and the crew turned, saluting Jaeger as she stepped beneath the high-vaulted ceiling. Moving stiffly, Occy and Baby trailing behind her, Jaeger walked up the double-row of warriors all in their hastily-fabricated, ill-fitting dress uniforms.
Her mag soles thunking faintly against the deck, Jaeger passed Toner and took the wide steps up the dais at the end of the cathedral chamber. She paused there, catching her breath as she stared at the activation pods arrayed, empty and waiting, before her. Ready to churn out more cannon fodder.
Like a priest rounding to address her congregation, Jaeger faced her crew.
“I suppose every commanding officer lives in fear of the first time they have to give this address,” she murmured.
At the base of the stairs, Toner shook his head slightly and made a lifting gesture from the base of his ribs. Jaeger sucked in a breath and lifted her voice until it echoed back to her from the arched ceiling.
“Today, right now, we remember the names and faces of our fallen companions, who died before they’d even begun to live. Any of you. Any one of you. Can you tell me their names?”
Silence hung like an anvil above them. Then Portia twitched and lifted her chin, calling, “She told me her name was Simia.”
A whisper passed through the crew. Jaeger lifted her hands, encouraging.
“He told me to call him Felix,” someone murmured, and a scattered few others nodded.
“Lupin,” someone called.
“Ursa.”
“Piscis.”
“Piscis,” Jaeger responded. “And Ursa and Lupin, and Felix and Simia. Remember those names. It’s the only thing about them you’ll ever know. It’s the only thing anybody will ever know about the people who died beside you yesterday. They came into this world alone. For one day they fought, and in one day they died. Now, everything about them but their names will end up lost to history.”
She wiped a flake of grit from one eye and took a moment to compose herself before going on. “I’m going to give you new orders,” she said. “They’re the most important ones you’ll ever get. I order you to live. I order you to go forward and make friends and enemies. I order you to go forth and make good stories that people will tell about you when you’re gone.”
She tipped her head back to study the ceiling far overhead, but it was no good. Tears trickled down the corners of her eyes and ran into her ears.
“Before we left on this mission, I promised you a party.” She cleared her throat and looked back down at her crew, at all their puzzled, apprehensive faces. “Traditionally, at a memorial, you honor the dead. You’ve been dead your whole life.
“I want you to get out of here and go honor life. We’re going to make a monument. We’re going to put the names of the fallen on it. But…damn. Right now I just want to hear music. I want to see people dancing.” She lifted a hand, dismissing them all from their formal posture. She cupped her hands over her mouth. “So go on! Dance because you have your whole life ahead of you!”
Jaeger had removed the alcohol prohibition from the fabricators and allowed Toner to whip up a single bowl of drunken punch. Well, she had said he could make a bowl. He came to the party with a thirty-gallon drum full of sloshing liquid.
“Whaaaat?” he drawled when he caught her outraged stare. “We’re in zero-G, Captain. A bowl doesn’t make any sense. Everything would float out of it.”
She hated that he had a point.
“Untwist your panties,” he added. “It’s ten parts pineapple juice and one part rum. They’ll die of diabetic shock before they get drunk.”
“Thanks, that’s very comforting.”
Overhead, Portia curiously fiddled with one of the dozens of straw apertures jutting out of the floating barrel. Given that there was no gravity, the only practical way to even get a drink was to chase down the barrel and suck off one of the straws.
“So!” Toner sidled up beside Jaeger. “‘Go forth, get wasted, get laid.’” He nodded appreciatively. “Classic message. Age-old hit. You’re getting the hang of public speaking.”
The acoustics in No-A were amazing. Bob Seger’s Old Time Rock and Roll piped through the speakers. Bodies swayed and jerked around them as the young crew searched the music for a beat they could match, a line they could dance. Some of them twisted through the air, while others thunked on the floor, busy trying to work out the logistics of line dancing.
Clumsy but eager to try. Eager to move.
Toner stepped onto the dance floor and turned. He held a hand out to her. “You’ve talked the talk. Now show them you can walk the walk.”
Jaeger stared at the offered hand.
“Toner…” She wasn’t sure what to say.
His easy grin wavered. “Come on. We’re friends. Friends can share a dance. Otherwise…” He gestured broadly to the mass of thrumming, twisting bodies around him. “What is this? Are we in the business of hosting orgies now?”
Jaeger shook her head. “So distribution should undo excess,” she murmured. “And each man have enough.”
She hated the look that flickered over his face. That frustrated, hurt, puppy-dog look.
“You’re quoting Lear at me?” he said. “That is so last year. Fine.” He shrugged and bobbed into the air, his anti-grav mag soles surging to life beneath him. “Your loss.” He turned and soared into the air, joining the eagles in their flight.
“I wouldn’t think to find you here.”
The No-A lounge was empty, save for one man drifting through the galley kitchen, brows knitted into a scowl as he read something on his computer screen. The lounge was quiet and dark, lit only by the disco lights strobing through the stacks from the party at the other end of the sector.
Seeker glanced up.
“Why not?” he asked.
Jaeger shrugged and stepped into the kitchen, fiddling with the food fabricator. “Of all the places you could go, you come back here?” She gestured at the patched-over hole in the wall at the side of the lounge. “Where you got ganked?”
Though she didn’t entirely trust him, Jaeger had allowed Seeker a leave of absence from his prison to join the crew for the memorial and after-party. He’d bled to defend this ship. He’d earned a night to relax as much as any member of her crew.
Except that he wasn’t exactly celebrating, huddled and alone in the dark like he was, staring at his computer screen. She wasn’t worried he would get into trouble—she had specifically updated the No-A security protocols to lock him out of all systems and alert her if he even tried to tap into the network or leave the sector.
Besides, she’d set Baby to watch him like a hawk. The two-ton tardigrade lurked in the deep shadows of the lounge, attentive as Jaeger drew near. Only an idiot would try to make trouble with that toothy face-hole looming over his shoulder. It was time to get to work.
Seeker rubbed ruefully at the faint line of discolored skin ringing his neck. Occy had slipped into the room, and the mutant creeped him out. “I’m not scared of a few memories,” he said. “Just…keep your pet octopus away from me.”
“Occy can go where he likes. It’s his ship too,” Jaeger snapped, punching in the fabricator code for a cinnamon roll. She really wanted a cinnamon roll—almost as much as she wanted a distraction.
“You up for a game?” she asked abruptly, rounding on Seeker.
Seeker stared at her now, the computer light turning his face into a mask of shifting shadows. “I would,” he said, “But I left my set back in the cell.”
“Virgil, p
ull up the holographic chess program.”
The overhead projector flickered, and a translucent chessboard appeared, a meter across and glowing, in the center of the lounge. Jaeger slipped a thermal bag over her hand and pulled her cinnamon roll out of the fabricator.
“I see your idea of a party is doing the same damn thing you do every day.” With a flick of his finger, Seeker sent one of the pawns skidding across the ghostly chessboard.
“Yours too,” she said gruffly, pointing at the computer. “What were you reading?”
“Ian Fleming,” Seeker admitted. “The computer had all of the James Bond stuff on file. It’s not bad. Are you gonna move?”
Jaeger scowled at the board. Where she should have seen order and rules, all she saw was a chaotic jumble of light and shadow. “It’s all fucked,” she said.
Seeker shrugged. “Sometimes, I wonder if you were born yesterday, like the rest of your crew.”
She gave him a dirty glare. “No. That’s the fucked part. I’m responsible for these people. I have the power to give them life—and to order them to go die.”
“Welcome to command, Jaeger.”
“You say that like it’s a fact of life,” she said. “Like it’s part of the…the laws of physics. That the people in command have to send others off to die, otherwise, what? The sun will go out? The world will stop turning?”
“Delusional.”
Jaeger froze. She blinked up at the shadowy speaker overhead. “You…have something you wish to add, Virgil?”
The speaker crackled to life. “Human history is written in blood. You need ink to write a story, Captain.”
“I’m not an idiot,” she snapped. “Death happens. I know that. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made. That doesn’t mean you have to charge off into the future, throwing others in front of you like a meat shield when things get rough. Sacrifice like that should be a rare thing that happens when there’s no other choice. Some things we shouldn’t sacrifice.”