Cast of Nova

by S J McLaughlin

  Kendal opened his mouth, ready to let a stream of insults pour out, but was interrupted. The door opened and Kendal stood upright, trying to play it off like he’d been standing there calm the whole time.

  Desmond walked in and set the medkit on the foot of the bed, opening it up and taking out a selection of supplies.

  “You first, lieutenant,” Desmond said. “Shirt off.”

  “Shouldn’t you get the bullet out of Boe’s arm?” Kendal asked. “Seems more important.”

  Desmond laughed. “Weren’t you in the army?”

  “I was in fleet,” Kendal said. “It’s more like to office work than anything, since the war ended.”

  “Well, you ought to remember that bullets do a damn good job at sterilizing themselves.” Desmond poured rubbing alcohol into a rag, letting it soak up while Kendal unbuttoned his shirt to expose his burnt shoulder. “Tryin’ to take it out might cause all sorts of problems. Don’t want him bleedin’ to death or nothing. It’s fine right where it is.”

  Desmond set the rag on the burn. Kendal hissed, the alcohol stinging enough he could feel it down in his fingertips.

  “Boe might be fine, but this here burn might be a problem if I don’t clean ‘er up right now.”

  Kendal nodded and let Desmond clean the wound. He picked at the dead skin with tweezers and pulled out the bits of melted fabric that’d sealed over already.

  “How’s Mira?” Kendal asked, trying to get his mind off the pain.

  “She’s fine,” Desmond said. “Got some burnt up hair that she ain’t too happy ‘bout, but she ain’t hurt. You got the worst of it.”

  Kendal’s arm had numbed and he could barely wiggle his fingertips anymore. Desmond finished cleaning the burn and wrapped his shoulder in a bandage.

  Kendal watched as Desmond stitched up the hole in Boe’s arm and wrapped it in a bandage. He was much quicker with Boe, almost like he was in a hurry.

  “That should be fine,” Desmond said, checking Boe’s restrains to make sure they were secure. He packed up the kit and turned out the light. “Come on, lieutenant. We gotta talk.”

  Kendal followed him as he left the room and locked Boe inside. Desmond looked out into the common room, then walked down the crew hallway. They stopped at the end, beside Desmond’s room. They both faced each other. Kendal wasn’t sure who should speak first.

  “I heard you talkin’ in there,” Desmond said. “With Boe about the Union.”

  Kendal clenched his teeth. Damn it. “It wasn’t what it sounded like.”

  “Jack,” Desmond said. “I ain’t gonna pretend that I like you. Or that you’re even someone I’d have picked to be here. But that don’t mean you’re not a part of this crew. You hold your end, and make sure you get done what needs to be done, and you have my respect. Same goes for Mira.”

  Kendal nodded and looked straight at him. It was as if Desmond was hoping Kendal would speak, but Kendal had nothing he wanted to say.

  Desmond typed his access code into his cabin door and the door swung open. He went to go inside, but stopped halfway through the door. “I hate to even admit this,” Desmond said, “but you’re tougher than you realize. You spend damn near two minutes in absolute zero after takin’ an EG-blast. I think that once the Union in you wears off you might be fit to live in this system after all.”

  He closed the door and left Kendal alone in the hallway. Kendal wasn’t sure what to do after that and decided to go to his cabin. He must have been more tired than he thought, falling asleep as soon as he hit the bed.

  Before he knew it, it was morning.

  Chapter 17

  “I ain’t seeing anything,” Desmond said. He cycled through the readings on the monitor, showing Kendal all the radars and indicators. “Nothing followed us.”

  “You sure?” Kendal asked, leaning up against Desmond’s chair and watching the screen. “Shows that there’s a lot of motion around us.”

  “Just space junk and rocks,” Desmond said. He flicked off the monitors and got out of his chair. “They ain’t following us, Kid.”

  “They knew where we were,” Kendal said. “They knew which direction the ship left in, and they know who I am.”

  “And yet there’s about five planets this way. Even if they managed track us to Jenny, there’s about a million places we could have landed. Don’t worry yourself.”

  Kendal sighed and nodded his head. Desmond was right. There was no way the Union could have tracked them. Kendal was only worrying himself.

  He changed the ship’s internal code to be sure, and went to dining room to meet up with the others.

  Mira was already at the table, staring at the plate of ration bars, biscuits, and vegetable mush in the center.

  She’s cut her hair off below the ears, above where the burnt tips had been. It spiked up in the back and her bangs swooped to the side and fanned out over her forehead. She looked different with short hair. Jaw more angular and cheekbones sunken. He saw more of her eyes and neck now, making her look younger.

  “You cut your hair,” he said.

  “Wasn’t gonna go ‘round all lopsided,” she said, trying not to look him in the eye.

  “It looks nice,” Kendal said, taking a seat beside her.

  “Either you’re just being sweet,” Mira said, “or you got some terrible taste in women.”

  “I’m not just saying it,” Kendal said.

  “Then I’d really hate to see what kind of women you’ve been with in your life.”

  He forced a smile and left it at that. This was their first meal after escaping the Bachman, and Kendal was hungry enough that he felt tremors.

  Desmond came back from the common room. Boe was with him, arms chained to his front. He sat Boe down across from Mira and Kendal, and ran Boe’s chain between the metal bar underneath the table, giving him enough room to set his hands on the table so he could eat.

  “I don’t like him being out here,” Mira said.

  “Tough,” Desmond said. He sat next to Boe and set his kinetic on the table by his plate, within his reach and far from Boe’s.

  “Kendal think’s it’s a bad idea too,” Mira said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Can’t trust him in there with forks and knives all by himself,” Desmond said, already filling his plate with food. “Might find a way to get himself free. Or might just jab himself in his neck.”

  Mira laughed into her hand. “I think we oughta just let him eat with his mouth,” she said, both her and Kendal filling their plates as well.

  “He ain’t a dog, Mir.”

  “The hell’s a dog?” Mira said.

  Desmond raised a brow. “You don’t have ‘em where you’re from?”

  Mira shook her head. “Don’t got those were I’m from.”

  “Shame,” Desmond said, giving Boe a smaller portion of ration bar than the others. Boe struggled to eat with his hands chained, having to lean down to take a bite.

  “You think we make it straight to Sintic from Jennifer?” Kendal asked.

  “Only if we go into Union space,” Dess said. “If we detour around we’d need to refuel and maybe take another job.”

  “I’d rather avoid dealing with the Union again,” Kendal said. “We’ve gotten lucky twice already.”

  “We weren’t lucky,” Mira said. “We were smart about it. They ain’t even come close to catching us. We should go straight.”

  “Kendal’s right,” Desmond said. “It’s too risky. We’d get caught.”

  No one noticed until it was too late that Boe had wiggled the chain through a gap in the metal bar. Boe, faster than anyone could react to, grabbed the kinetic from beside Desmond and kicked the table over. It flipped up and threw Mira and Kendal out of their seats and onto the ground. The corner of wooden slab nicked Kendal in the jaw as it landed on top of him and pinned him to the floor.

  Boe fired the kinetic. Kendal’s ears rang. He couldn’t hear anything, yet felt the shuffle of footsteps and the d
ropping of weight in the floor.

  He wiggled himself out from under the table, scrapping his legs against the edge, and stood up, brushing glass and mashed ration bars off his shirt.

  Mira tackled Boe to the ground and wrestled his kinetic away. Kendal rushed over and grabbed it, holding at Boe while Mira punched Boe hard enough that she’ would complain about her sore knuckles for days.

  She kept beating him. One punch after another until her knuckles were peeling and bloody. Boe tried to crawl away, but she wouldn’t let him. Kendal caught her wrist as she tried to strike him again. She squirmed and struggled, trying get at Boe.

  Christ, she’s strong, Kendal thought. “Calm down.”

  Mira bit Kendal’s arm hard enough to draw blood. He pulled back and let go of her wrists. She gave Boe one final kick before giving up and walking over to the wall, facing away from the room.

  Kendal sucked the wound on his arm. Goddamn it.

  Boe was whimpering and laying on his side, drooling blood from his face. That’s when Kendal noticed that Desmond hadn’t moved. He was lying on the ground, half on his back and half on his side, with a hole in his chest.

  “Desmond?” Kendal said. He walked up and saw that Desmond’s eyes were open. Staring at nothing and dilated to a pitch black.

  Kendal felt his neck choke up. “Dess?”

  “He’s not getting up,” Mira said. “He’s dead.”

  Kendal tried to speak, but his words came out in a jumble of fragments.

  They were hurling through space with no pilot and no one who knew how the ship even worked. He chose not to say anything, and instead grabbed Boe and dragged him back towards the spare cabin.

  “Kendal!” Mira said, stopping him at the door to the common room.

  Kendal turned back around, and saw Mira with her eyes red and her fists dripping blood. He held Boe’s chain tight and waited, but she didn’t say anything.

  He threw Boe back into the spare cabin and chained him to the bed. Boe’s lip was busted and his face was bruised and puffy. His nose had been beaten crooked. Broken and healing wrong. Kendal grabbed the bridge of his nose, getting a whimper in response.

  “This’ll only hurt a second,” Kendal said before snapping it back in place. Boe screamed loud enough that Mira probably heard it on the other side of the ship.

  Once Boe stopped whining, Kendal took the pillowcase off one of the pillows and gave it to Boe to use as a rag. “Why Desmond?” Kendal asked.

  Boe laughed, then coughed, then blew blood from his nose into the pillowcase. “He was on my side of the table.”

  “You grabbed the gun first,” Kendal said. “You grabbed the gun, then you kicked over the table. You could have shot me, or Mira. Why Desmond?”

  “Because I wanted to hurt her,” he said. “I could have shot her, or I could have shot you, but you saw the way she looked at him. The way she admired him. She’s probably back there crying her eyes out over his corpse.”

  “What did she ever do to you?” Kendal said.

  “Shot me,” he said. “Kicked me, pushed me, stole me, and was going to sell me to fucking Sava, of all the god damned people in the system.”

  “I did all that too,” Kendal said, and leaned close to Boe. “Why her?”

  Boe bit his lip. Kendal could tell he was trying to hold back, but then Boe let it all out. “It’s because she was nice to me,” he said. “Back on the Bachman, I thought she actually cared about me. How often does a girl like that come up and make conversation with you in the hall? A nice girl who seems interested in you and is impressed by how much you’ve achieved. I thought it was going to be a great day. Get to know her, maybe see her more often. Then she shoots you in the shoulder and beats you ugly. How shitty would you feel if that happened to you? Huh? Cute Union woman came up to you and made friendly, then turned right around and shot you in the back?”

  Kendal almost said, I know what it’s like, but he kept quiet. It wasn’t worth going into, especially with Boe of all people. Kendal stood up to leave.

  “Hey,” Boe said, stopping him at the door. “Thanks for pulling that bitch off me when you did. I was afraid she’d stick her thumbs through my eyes or tear out my tongue.”

  “She knocked half your teeth in.”

  Boe opened his lips and licked his tongue between the bloody gaps in his front teeth. “She made me look just like her.” Boe laughed. “Now we’re just a bunch of freaks on a ship with our lives in the hands of a bastard named Sava.

  “I think you can go the rest of the day without eating,” Kendal said. “I’ll bring you something tomorrow. We should be at Jennifer in a few days,”

  Boe laughed. “Good luck landing this thing without a pilot,” he said.

  Kendal had enough of this and opened the door to leave.

  “Good luck without your pilot!” Boe screamed as the door’s shut. He kept screaming it through the door in between huffs of laughter until Kendal was far enough he couldn’t hear him.

  The ship was quieter than usual. It was never much of a loud place, but there were no footsteps or voices from the common room or the kitchen. He straightened his collar and cleared his throat. He was tired and wanted nothing less than to hide in his cabin and rest until it was tomorrow, but he knew he couldn’t.

  Mira was in still the dining room, running her hands under the tap and cleaning the blood and bits of peeled skin from her knuckles. Desmond was in the same spot, only Mira had closed his eyes and laid him on his back with his arms to his sides.

  They tried to have a conversation, but they couldn’t keep their own thoughts from distracting them. They tried to talk about landing the ship, delivering Boe, and plans for getting to Sintic, but all they could keep focused on was how they would dispose of Desmond’s body.

  Kendal convinced her that space burial was proper, at least as far as Kendal’s upbringing was concerned.

  They laid Desmond down in the entryway, feet facing the door. Mira had cleaned the blood off his hands and neck, and tried to make him presentable. Kendal wanted to say something, but neither of them spoke.

  Mira stood beside Kendal as he put his hand on the scanner and opened the ship door. She held onto Kendal’s arm to keep a footing against the vacuum as the air rushed out the door, pulling Desmond Kanta along with it.

  That night, when Kendal was trying to sleep, all he could think about was Nova.

  Chapter 18

  Kendal had trouble sleeping. All through the night he tossed and turned, sweating under the covers and drifting into sleepless thoughts. He never thought the loss of Desmond would affect him, yet the night after he died was one of the hardest he’d ever had.

  He remembered being young. Not as a child. Nothing from that time in his life was worth thinking about. A good home with good parents and a good education. Nothing anyone would ever listen to him ramble about, and nothing that would ever make it into a great biography.

  His story began four years back. He was still recovering from his teenage years when he graduated from the academy and was stationed aboard the Morana. All his co-graduates congratulated him on his placement. To be on the Morana at his age was rare and normally meant a life of opportunity was ahead of him.

  He wasn’t yet an officer, although ‘officer’ had become a generic term for anyone in the Union at that point, and that’s what he was treated as. He worked his way through the system by delivering messages across the important sectors of the ship. This was something he’d resent doing years later, but at the time it was perfect. While the other officers at his rank were working hard, he was getting his face know across the upper ranks.

  Most knew his name by the end of the first quarter, and this is why he was chosen among the communication room officers to deliver a message to the admiral. There was, of course, a messaging system through the computers, but there were too many messages being pushed that the admiral ignored them until quiet hours, a practice that kept on the Morana until its last days. It was up to younger officers t
o get the messages to the admiral that needed to be read immediately. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked.

  He was given a choice to deliver it or not, as he’d heard how temperamental the admiral could be, but he didn’t hesitate in taking the slip and went straight for the bridge. Guarding the entrance was an officer of lower rank than Kendal, yet a few years older. He was new on the Morana and Kendal was already getting to know him. His name was Vernan.

  “Morning,” Kendal had said, smile on his face.

  “Morning, Kendal.” Vernan stepped aside to let him into the bridge.

  Notoriety earns respect in the Union, and Kendal was taking full advantage of it. If things had continued that way, Kendal would have gone on to being a respected officer, and eventually on to being a captain.

  But then he met the admiral.

  Kendal marched up the stairs onto the center platform. He’d been on the Morana half a year at that point, but never met the admiral until then.

  He swallowed, standing on the platform like it was a stage.

  “I have a message,” Kendal had said, voice cracking a bit at the start. He was more nervous than he thought.

  The admiral had been staring at the display of nearby space. The Morana was in a fleet of twenty, coating around the neighboring space of U4.

  The admiral turned around and approached. “Is it important?”

  Kendal swallowed. “Of course,” he had said. “Tenna – Officer Tenna said it needed to be acted on right away, and I figured she was right on that.”

  Admiral Ross walked up to him. She was taller than most of the woman he’d met. Six feet tall, same height as him. She was wide at the hips and chubby on the face. Her uniform framed her body well, but he’d later see what was under all of that. Her hair was golden and bouncy, pushed over to one side and resting off a shoulder. What put him on edge was how she looked at him. Eyes sharp and mouth resting at a frown. That’s what the other officers had said about her; that she never smiled and she always moved like she was conscious of everything around her. They were mostly right about her. Only, it wasn’t that she never smiled, it was that she rarely smiled.