Clash of Mountains

by Chloe Garner

  As fast as it happened, it was gone, and they were walking, neither of them stealing the dignity of the moment by noticing it. She followed him to the conference room, in between the hallway to the mess room and the door that went to the medical bay. It wasn’t built to hold more than about a dozen people at once, and Sarah had taken classes in here. In panels, she’d sat at the back, taking notes, writing essays, silent arguments with the spoken statements the officers on the panels. At the end, she’d turn them in and everyone on the panel would read them and comment. A few times, they’d reversed decisions based on her input.

  Points.

  Points on an invisible scoreboard.

  And now she was at the front of the room.

  She passed out her briefing packets - she preferred paper for the touch of it, and the quick reference, even though the LaVelle technically frowned on its use - and she put her screen down on the comm pad at the front of the table, sending the image on it onto the wall behind her.

  “Good afternoon,” she said. They kept Intec time, generally, though some portion of the crew was on day shift at all times. She let the men and women at the table flip pages - they always did, wanting to get a sense of scope before the speaker tried to shape their opinions of the proposal. She’d seen men and women, up here in this space, try to steal the attention back with loud words or slow ones, but Sarah just let them take their time. Either the material was sound or it wasn’t.

  “Satellite,” the head of the committee said, looking up at her. Lieutenant William Barker. His men called him Barkey. His friends called him Willy.

  “Yes, sir,” Sarah said. He flipped another page.

  “I hesitate to even read it,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “We all know you’ll have made the most compelling case possible.”

  She smiled.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The top of his head only came up to her nose, but she still had a sense of being in the presence of a man who towered over her. He was second only to the Captain in command of the ship, and his opinion was the most important at the table by a long shot.

  “I thought you’d be here with a more… consequential request,” he said. She crossed her arms.

  “Yes, sir?”

  He snorted, putting his hand flat on the document on the table.

  “We keep tabs on our people,” he said. “Immigrated or not, you’re one of us, and you always will be. You dropped off the radar for a long time, and some of us had started speculating that you’d gotten yourself killed. Imagine my lack of surprise when you popped up again at the head of the most influential economic shift in a generation.”

  “It was touch and go for a while, sir,” Sarah said. He smiled, genuine amusement, pride.

  Pride.

  Only here, only in this moment, would she let that touch her.

  No one else’s opinion of her mattered but her own. Not ever.

  On the LaVelle, she was someone else, though. It hadn’t made sense to her. She hadn’t even really understood it at the time. Something about being off the planet. Something about being select. Something about the structure up here.

  “All right,” he said, looking around the table at the familiar faces there. “Blow us away.”

  She dipped her head, then turned to look at the wall, beginning the presentation she’d been mentally assembling since Magnum. She hadn’t had it all in her head at once the entire time, because if she knew the words, the order, the ideas she wanted to present, she’d get hung up on those things and come across wooden and fake. Her material from the presentation - not slick, by any measure, but at least experienced - kept her on the path she wanted to build, kept her moving, but the rest of the presentation was all but improvised.

  Lawrence.

  Why it was an important place.

  Absenta.

  Why it mattered to the world.

  Basic economic theories about information.

  The finances of the town. How they’d communicate with the satellite, when they’d start using it, when they’d be ready to launch it. What they’d be using it for.

  Side benefits of giving communication capabilities to towns like Magnum and Jeremiah, ones that were outside of the path of the existing comm equipment.

  The mission of the LaVelle not just being economic, but about development, and how the cost was well-contained, even just compared to the development opportunities they’d give people in the path of the new satellite.

  Cause and effect, passion without emotion. Data, where it was possible to include it.

  Twenty minutes.

  She would have had a thirty minute slot, and a lot of people had thirty-four minutes’ worth of material that they tried to cram into thirty, but she knew that a lot of the persuasion came from, first, not seeming to be clinging to every moment they gave her and, second, letting them talk back to her once she was done.

  The printed material was slightly more thorough, but not much.

  She had a compelling case.

  It was about what else was going on in the next thirty days.

  She took a step forward, putting herself between the wall display, and she folded her hands behind her back.

  “What deserves further clarification?” she asked.

  The Lieutenant thumbed through the papers once more, looking at her with a thoughtful expression.

  “You really think you can get up on top of this with just faster communication?” he asked.

  “Weeks to minutes makes a big difference in a place like Lawrence,” Sarah said. He shook his head.

  “You thought you cowed her, but the ground-side investigator sent us her report. She advocated letting you come up to make your report and then sending you back to another launch point, in the interest of saving your life.”

  Sarah let the corner of her mouth come up.

  “I did think I did a better job getting her to keep her thoughts to herself,” Sarah said.

  “You’re a graduate,” Lieutenant Barker said. “That buys you a lot more leeway than maybe you think.”

  “I’m very interested in what else she told you,” Sarah said. Sarah’s background check could have a big hole in it, if they connected her to Jimmy.

  Barker gave her a sideways grin.

  “She didn’t have to tell us much,” he said. “You got shot at. Everything else, we pretty much knew.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “I see.”

  “You didn’t think we’d let you up here, if we knew you were a person like that,” he said. She shrugged.

  “You prefer your recruits shiny-faced and… simple.”

  He shook his head.

  “I think most of them don’t figure it out until they hit the professional scene, so it isn’t surprising that you didn’t ever see it, but there are more complicated pasts in these classes than you might think. We teach discipline, and we offer perspective. It’s held off wars.”

  She felt her eyes go distant as she went back through her semester aboard again, letting her mind go through the other program kids, looking at them with new eyes.

  Yes.

  She could see that.

  It was tactical. They’d have been chosen carefully, but the LaVelle was known for influence.

  She’d been short-sighted in estimating just how much influence.

  She nodded slowly, coming back to Lieutenant Barker.

  “You must have thought you made a bad bet on me, then,” she said. He grinned.

  “Never. The ones who die young… maybe we couldn’t have ever changed what was going to happen, but often they’re the ones who were the most worth trying.”

  She nodded slowly. Lieutenant Barker lifted his chin.

  “Are you sure this is what you’re here to ask for?”

  “What are you trying to goad me into, Lieutenant?” Sarah asked. He nodded.

  “We aren’t the only ones with a tactic in mind,” he said. “We’ll review your proposal and have an answer to you before your to
morrow morning.”

  She gave them a small bow, looking at the student in the back corner, wondering at it that she’d missed him until now, then looked at the Lieutenant again.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, picking up her screen and tucking it under her arm as the young officer at the back stood to escort her back to the civilian side.

  And that was it.

  A week of travel, an exchange of gunfire, near arrest, and Sunny. She’d done what she’d come to do, twenty-four minutes. In twelve hours or less, she’d have an answer, and then…

  Well.

  And then.

  She went across the large open space on the military side, casting a single glance at the wide doorway to the control room, then shook her head and followed, crossing back to the common area on the civilian side.

  “Thank you,” she said to the officer, who gave her a little nod and left, going back to his next task. Sarah looked around the cargo-crammed space.

  She’d lived here.

  She went over to the wide window, sloped at forty-five degrees to the floor, where she could look down at the planet below.

  “We look out for our own,” a voice said, and Sarah turned to look at Captain Melanie Wright.

  “Captain,” Sarah said, genuinely surprised.

  “There are people down there who want to kill you,” the woman said, coming to stand next to her to look out the window.

  “Isn’t anything new about that today compared to a decade ago,” Sarah answered.

  “You’re from the Rawlins desert,” Captain Wright said.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Sarah answered. “The bad end.”

  No one down there called it that, but she knew her LaVelle maps well enough to recognize it.

  “It’s a hard place,” Wright said.

  “You’ve been there?” Sarah asked.

  “No,” Wright said. “But I’ve seen the way the weather works. I might understand that place better than anyone.”

  “No, Ma’am,” Sarah said. “Respectfully.”

  The woman smiled.

  “You won’t let us help you,” Wright said, and Sarah shook her head.

  “It isn’t a problem that’s going to go away because I ran,” she said.

  “Sometimes retreat is simply plotting a new path to victory,” Wright said. Sarah knew the woman’s history about as well as anyone did. Captains of the LaVelle came in various flavors, and Wright was steeped in military history. The place ran today about the way it had for the last fifty years; the crew had the freedom to elect a new Captain each time the old one retired, and they’d opted for someone who cared about the past and the way things were done, rather than prioritizing someone who had the technical capability to ride out some of the hardware issues of the past generation.

  “It’s my risk to take,” Sarah said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the LaVelle.”

  “Everything has to do with the LaVelle,” Wright said evenly. Sarah looked back at her, raising an eyebrow, and Wright nodded evenly. “People forget that the LaVelle has a mission. It wasn’t an incubator, and it wasn’t a shuttle. We have a mission to adhere to, and that’s part of why they chose me to captain.”

  Sarah looked down at the planet.

  “Oversee and facilitate the establishment of a human colony on a receptive planet,” Sarah said.

  “Good memory.”

  “Part of what got me up here,” Sarah said.

  The woman came to stand next to her, looking down at the planet.

  “It never fails to move me, looking at it down there.”

  “Do you miss it?” Sarah asked. Captain Wright breathed slowly, her arms behind her back. Crew on the LaVelle skipped their Perpeto every six months, giving some visible distinction from one to another of them by age without penalizing them with real middle age. Captain Wright was one of the oldest, clear-eyed and serene looking down at the planet below them. She would retire within the next decade, living out the rest of her life on the ship while someone stepped up as the next captain.

  She would never again walk with earth beneath her feet.

  Sarah had always wondered, but she’d never had a conversation with the Captain before. The students weren’t important enough to warrant two-direction communication with her.

  “I do,” the woman said. “I remember wind. Rain. Going into rooms I’d never been in, before. But this was a calling, since I even knew what the job was. I never dreamed I’d be Captain of the LaVelle, but I wanted to be up here… watching over.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “I don’t shoot that high.”

  “And yet, here you are,” the woman said. Sarah glanced over.

  “Asking you to launch a satellite for us,” she said. Captain Wright smiled.

  “If it were only in your own self-interest, you would have known better than to even show up,” she said. “I didn’t see your materials yet, but Barkey said you did a damned fine job.”

  Sarah pressed her mouth in a quiet smile and looked back at the planet. It was getting close to the point where they should be able to see the desert out on the horizon again. Another twenty minutes until it would be in comm range, if it had had towers, and another hour until they’d do the pod swap, but Lawrence would be there, under her feet.

  “It’s time we had equatorial satellites,” Wright said quietly. “They won’t give you an answer until they’ve had time to consider all of the tradeoffs, but it’s past time. You didn’t include the colonies on the other side of the mountains in your math. Should have.”

  “Thought you hadn’t seen my material,” Sarah answered. She heard Wright laugh.

  “It was a guess.”

  Sarah frowned.

  That had been a very specific, very good guess.

  “How much attention have you paid to me?” she asked.

  “My technical qualification was military history, but my ability to understand and manage people is why I got this job,” Wright said. “You get tunnel vision, going after what you want. Always have. Makes you a force to be reckoned with, but…”

  Sarah drew a deep breath, feeling like the student she’d been, not the woman she was.

  “It’s what makes you, combined with Jimmy, so dangerous,” Wright said. Sarah didn’t let the breath out for several moments.

  “You asked about my feelings,” Captain Wright said. “Permit me to ask about yours. Do you love him? Or do you just find each other complementary?”

  “You don’t know?” Sarah asked.

  “We didn’t know about your history until recently,” Wright said. “Naughty young woman that you were.”

  There was humor in her voice. Sarah didn’t like her talking like that.

  “More, though,” Wright continued. “Jimmy Lawson isn’t easy to get someone up close to. They don’t know much about him as a person. Just his legend and his habits. I don’t know if he’s even the type of man a woman loves.”

  “He is,” Sarah said. It was a truth she wouldn’t have felt obligated to, for anyone else, but Captain Wright, Captain Wright of the LaVelle, Sarah couldn’t deny it to her.

  “I see,” Wright said. “The woman traveling with you?”

  “Sunny Lawson,” Sarah said. “My sister-in-law.”

  “Friend?”

  “No.”

  “I see. One of the crew caught that she has a long-back tie to the crew. Technically, she’s one of us, though in a much more distant capacity.”

  Sarah cursed herself for not keeping her mouth shut, but they’d come this far.

  “She’d give quite a lot to look at the control room,” Sarah said.

  “We don’t do that,” Wright said, and Sarah nodded.

  “It’s why I wasn’t asking.”

  Wright laughed.

  “Do you know why we don’t let civilians into the control room?”

  “Because it’s a damned fool thing to do, letting people who don’t belong there into your brain,” Sarah said and Captain Wright laughed. Actual
ly laughed.

  “Before we even launched, Captain LaVelle let Tempra Rawlins - the woman your desert is named for - into the control room, and she caused quite a scene. Almost scrubbed the whole launch. They changed policy as a result that civilians aren’t allowed in there. What’s funny is that, if she hadn’t seen what she did, it’s likely all of them would have died on the way here. She saved every life on board.”

  “Still good policy,” Sarah said, and she heard Captain Wright smile.

  “Her mother is something,” she said. Sarah looked over.

  “So the whole running a ship thing is just a side hobby?”

  “Threats,” Wright said, her voice firm. “We take threats very seriously.”

  “She actually did it?” Sarah asked. “I wasn’t sure. Might have been a figure of speech.”

  Wright shook her head.

  “Threatened to blow up a space port if her daughter tried to join us.”

  “Would you have taken her after that?” Sarah asked. Wright shook her head.

  “As far as we could tell, the woman was serious. It wasn’t just a feint.”

  Sarah frowned.

  “Bringing in a liability like that doesn’t sound like Jimmy,” Sarah said.

  “I’m not sure she knows where her daughter is, at present,” Wright said. “And I don’t think she cares.”

  Sarah let her mind go back to the room where Sunny would just be sitting, waiting for time to go.

  “Why would her mother go to such a length to keep her from coming here, then let her disappear and not care?” Sarah asked.

  “Control,” Wright said. Sarah nodded. It did make sense.

  “Are you sure I can’t talk you into taking refuge here, for the short term?” Wright asked.

  “I’m certain,” Sarah said.

  “You are always welcome,” Captain Wright said. “They’ll make you go through the formality of getting on the list and going through screening. And the woman down on the surface may add steps, just to prove that she’s still in control. But you’ll get your approval from up here.”

  Sarah glanced over.

  “I’ll be back,” she said. “We have more work to do.”