“Mostly everything?” Husher said.
“Well, your blood pressure’s high, which is unusual if you’ve been following the diet I recommended to you a couple months ago. I know you spend time in the gym regularly, so I’m sure lack of exercise isn’t the cause.”
She peered at him, as though expecting him to volunteer some revelation. Returning her stare somewhat uncomfortably, he blinked, wishing he could come up with something funny to say. He struggled with that, lately.
“How’s your mental health, Captain Husher?”
“My…mental health? It’s, well—”
“I heard about the episode during the Gok engagement. Reports say you entered some sort of trance.”
He squinted. “Who told you that?”
“Scuttlebutt. Surely you’re familiar with how fast word travels, after serving aboard starships for so long.”
“It was Fesky, wasn’t it? She’s constantly fussing over me.”
“How’s your sleep, Captain?” Doctor Bancroft asked, and he didn’t miss the way she answered his question with one of her own.
It was definitely Fesky. “I’m sleeping all right, I guess.”
“You look tired, to me. There are dark patches under your eyes. Have you been having more nightmares?”
He sighed. “They’re getting more vivid. More intense.”
“They’ve been robbing your sleep.”
He nodded.
“The episode in the CIC…was that experience similar to your nightmares?”
“Yes.”
“And have you been feeling anxious?”
“Yeah. That’s pretty common since…since what happened. Lately, though, my temper’s pretty out of control, too.” Husher cleared his throat. “If you have any ideas for what I might do about any of this, I’d be grateful, Doctor. I think it’s affecting my ability to do my job, and I can’t have that.”
Bancroft’s mouth quirked to one side. “I think the first step is to start being a little more forgiving with yourself. Losing your daughter was devastating enough, but the way you lost her…honestly, I’m amazed that you’ve functioned as well as you have for this long.”
Husher pressed his lips together, trying not to focus on the little knot of tension that, years ago, had taken up permanent residence at the base of his throat.
His memory of losing Iris was crisp and clear enough that it might have happened an hour ago, instead of seventeen years. Sera, his wife at the time, had been at some charity event—the specific charity was one of the few details that had faded over the years—and she’d hired a babysitter to be with their three-year-old.
As luck had it, Husher had been getting back from a months-long deployment that very night, but he wasn’t due to get back until eleven. Hence, the babysitter.
Husher knew how it had killed Sera to have to leave Iris with a sitter, and she’d rarely ever done it. More than once, he’d accused her of being a helicopter parent—jokingly, but only half-jokingly. His ex-wife hadn’t wanted to expose their daughter to even the lowest levels of danger. Sera had baby-proofed their house months before she gave birth, and at three, Iris’s play dates with other kids her age were closely monitored by her mother, who didn’t get in much socializing with the other mothers.
Husher had made fun of her for that, but she’d been right, damn him. About all of it. Because as his self-driving taxi had pulled in front of his home that night, a precision-targeted kinetic orbital strike hit his house, and he’d watched in horror as an inferno consumed the structure he’d been seconds from entering.
Husher had been alone in the taxi, and he flung the door open, rushing to the front lawn before sinking to his knees, feeling thoroughly helpless. Though he knew both his daughter and her babysitter were both already dead, he took out his com and dialed the police.
It was no use. Robot-assisted firefighters efficiently extinguished the blaze thirty minutes later, but the house was obliterated, leaving no trace of either Iris or Candace, the sitter.
A couple hours later, authorities caught a Gok Slag attempting to sneak out of the Petrichor System using stealth systems that were barely functional copies of Winger tech. When they found the type of tungsten rods used in kinetic orbital strikes—strictly illegal under galactic law since the First Galactic War—they knew they had their culprit.
Husher’s marriage with Sera Caine had disintegrated rapidly in the months that followed. She never said it, but Husher was convinced that a big part of her blamed him for their daughter’s death. He’d been responsible for killing tens of thousands of Gok during the vicious conflict that had come hard on the heels of the Second Galactic War, and the attack on his house was a pretty clear act of vengeance.
Husher didn’t disagree with Sera’s thinking. He blamed himself, too.
“Captain,” Doctor Bancroft said, yanking him back to the present, “it’s my assessment that you’ve been suffering from undiagnosed PTSD in the years since your daughter’s death, and lately it’s come to the fore in a major way. There are a number of reasons that might be—for example, the fact that as we age, short-term memory begins to decline, often rendering longer-term memories more vivid and real. I strongly recommend we explore treatment options immediately.”
Nodding, Husher said, “Okay. What are our options?”
“There are two dominant treatments in the current literature. Drugs represent one option—SSRIs, specifically. Antidepressants and the like, which can also be quite effective in treating anxiety.”
“What’s the other option?”
“Prolonged Exposure Therapy, using virtual reality. Essentially, it involves gradual, increasing exposure to stimuli similar to that which triggered the disorder in the first place.”
“I’d rather not risk drugs. I’m worried they’d impair my ability to do my job even more than the nightmares already are.”
That brought a slight shrug from Bancroft. “The only real way to determine that would be to try them out.”
“I can’t afford to risk it, Doctor. Not with a possible conflict with the Gok brewing. Let’s try the exposure therapy.”
“Very well,” Bancroft said, leaning sideways to tap a note into a datapad. “I’ll schedule your first session for two days’ time.”
Chapter 5
Anything Anomalous
“Winterton,” Husher said, and the sensor operator twisted in his seat to face him. “You’ve been keeping an eye on the readouts from our active sensor sweeps?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, turning from his study of the display at the front of the CIC.
“Anything to report?”
“Negative, Captain.”
“I want to be notified the moment you see anything anomalous. I don’t care how mundane you think it might be, if it catches your attention, I’m to be notified immediately, even if I’m not in the CIC at the time. Make a note for your second- and third-watch counterparts to do the same.”
“I will, sir.”
Husher nodded, drumming his fingers on the command seat’s armrest, though he quickly stopped himself. I shouldn’t make my boredom so evident to the crew. Next, they’ll all be fidgeting.
When the Gok carrier had attacked the Vesta, the supercarrier had been fresh from orbit over Zakros, where she’d been parked for a week. Had his ship not been waylaid, Husher would have ordered her on to the Caprice System, the next stop along their patrol route. There, they would have orbited the system’s three colonies for a week each, doing exactly as they’d done over Zakros.
Instead, he ordered a return to her previous orbit. If a second threat reared its head, Zakros’ orbital defense platforms should help him make quick work of it. In the meantime, he ordered the Gok prisoners left over from the battle transferred to a planetside prison.
In total, the peacetime patrols fielded by the Integrated Galactic Fleet consisted of eight capital starships and their accompanying battle groups. But since the advent of cities aboard those capital starships, the pur
pose of patrol was no longer limited to defense. Instead, the rounds they made throughout the galaxy were viewed as an important engine for economic growth and stability.
To a well-established colony of billions, the appearance of a new city in their skies represented a modest yet valuable source of trade in both services and commodities from other systems. An employer unable to fill a position from among planetary populations might hire a graduate of a starship-based university, or people seeking work might rent a room or apartment aboard a starship city, in hopes of finding a job at one of the stops, if not in the city itself.
To a more recently established planetary colony, however, a visit from a capital starship represented significant economic stimulus.
Life aboard a starship city was the new life of glamor in the galactic consciousness, though while the citizens tended to be wealthier than most, Husher wasn’t sure he completely agreed. That said, it wasn’t his job to agree. It was his job to carry Cybele around the galaxy, which often made him feel more like a glorified cruise ship captain than the commander of the biggest warship the galaxy had ever known. Such was the screwed-up situation that had developed since the Gok Wars.
What worries me is that I’m pretty sure it’s still developing.
Whatever the case, their stops in the Caprice System would now be delayed while he awaited orders from IGF Command. Communication between star systems occurred exclusively via com drone. Once, humanity had had instantaneous communication via the dark tech-enabled micronet, but dark tech had been almost completely discontinued after the discovery that its use was gradually tearing apart the fabric of the universe.
That had been a near thing. Majorana fermion-infused starship decks were the one case where dark tech was still used, since no one had discovered a better way to simulate gravity other than to inject everyone and everything with Ocharium nanites, which interacted with the fermion matrix to provide an experience virtually identical to one G. However many Gs one wanted, actually. It depended on the number of nanites injected.
Luckily, after cutting out every other instance of dark tech, use of the Majorana fermions in starship decks had been found to have a negligible effect on the universe, and so they alone had been kept.
The CIC hatch, located to the left of the main display, opened to admit Fesky. She came to attention just inside, saluting.
“At ease, Commander. May I ask why you’re here? Your watch doesn’t start for another four hours.”
“I wanted to request a private audience with you, Captain.”
“You couldn’t request it over com?”
“I was nearby, so I decided to come here myself.”
Slowly, Husher nodded. It occurred to him that this was likely Fesky’s way of letting him know that whatever she wanted, it was important. He might have brushed off a com message, but for her to show up in person…
Of course, she could have let me know over com why it’s so important that we speak. Unless she was worried about their conversation being monitored, or reviewed at some point in the future. That was always a possibility, with the increasing levels of oversight from the Interstellar Union.
Husher rose from the command seat. “Kaboh, you have the CIC.”
“Aye, Captain,” the Kaithian said.
“My office?” Husher asked Fesky as the CIC hatch hissed closed behind them.
She nodded, saying nothing, and they walked in silence to his office, located a short distance away.
The chamber was sparsely decorated, though it was nowhere near as Spartan as Captain Keyes’s had been, back on the Providence. Two pairs of identically sized photos faced each other from the walls on either end of Husher’s desk. A photo of the Vesta, captured in all her glory on the day of her christening, hung opposite one of the Providence, taken from a research station after the supercarrier’s first successful mission in the Bastion Sector. It showed the Providence in orbit, with Thessaly’s moon behind her, and Thessaly below.
Husher hadn’t been serving on the Providence the day that photo was taken, but the image was the best he could find. Hanging beside it was a photo of the old supercarrier’s entire Air Group, standing in front of a row of Condor starfighters. The image featured both Husher and Fesky prominently. I miss my Condor. There were a few of the old fighters sitting by themselves down on Hangar Bay Theta, and a couple times, when Husher had needed time alone to think, he’d gone down there to tinker with them, knowing he wasn’t likely to run into anyone in the largely unused hangar bay.
Next to the Vesta’s likeness hung a photo of Husher and Captain Keyes standing beside each other in full uniform, in front of the Human Commonwealth flag. That photo had been taken in orbit over Mars during a lull that had preceded all-out war with the Ixa.
Two captains connected across time, Husher thought as he glimpsed that photo.
“You miss him,” Fesky said as she settled into the chair in front of his desk without having to be asked. Their friendship was such that they dropped military formalities whenever they were in private.
“Don’t you?”
“With all my heart.”
Husher’s shoulders slumped a little. “He was a better captain then I’ll ever be, Madcap,” he said, using Fesky’s callsign from their Condor-piloting days. “He never would have let things get this bad.”
“You’ve had to deal with pressures he never did.”
“I don’t know about that, exactly.”
Fesky clacked her beak, and her head twitched, as it often did. Every Winger looked distinct, but to Husher, Fesky had always most resembled a falcon. Her mood could be read pretty accurately by the stiffness of her feathers, and right now, he could see that she was agitated. “One man alone can’t hold back the tides of change, Husher.”
“Why did you ask to speak with me? I can tell something’s bothering you.”
It took a few seconds for Fesky to answer. “There’s been a group of protesters hanging out in the desert near the hatch,” she said. “They’ve been waiting for crewmembers to pass by on their way to the city. When one appears, they start chanting, and sometimes they even follow them to the city, drawing attention to them. One petty officer told me she was so embarrassed that she doesn’t plan to go back anytime soon.”
Husher could feel his cheeks heating up, and he remembered his discussion with Doctor Bancroft, about his temper. I have to make it to our first treatment session without blowing up. “What’s their problem?” he ground out, managing to keep his voice level.
“Apparently, they see your refusal to take the Implicit Association and Bias Test as a symptom of problematic attitudes among the crew. They want you and every human crewmember to undergo Awareness Training.”
Husher rose from his chair, and so did Fesky. He walked around the desk to join her.
“I’m going right now to talk some sense into them.”
“All right. I’ll have Major Gamble put together a marine escort.”
“No, you will not. I’m not going to start towing around bodyguards on my own ship.”
“Husher…”
“It’s not open to debate, Fesky.”
“Well, you should at least polish your boots before you go.”
Glancing down at them, he said, “They’re fine,” and he marched out into the corridor.
Chapter 6
Owning the Floor
Husher emerged from the hatch to find a couple dozen demonstrators with digital protest signs, which they’d incorporated into their Oculens overlays. The modern protester doesn’t need to bother with making a physical sign, or with holding it up.
When he first emerged, the demonstrators weren’t doing a lot of demonstrating, but they soon noticed him. They rallied around him in a semicircle and instructed their Oculenses to waggle their signs at him vigorously.
When they opened their mouths, no doubt to deploy a chant of some sort, Husher spoke up in an attempt to initiate a dialog instead.
“What are you trying to accom
plish by yelling at off-duty service members?” he asked, struggling to keep his tone neutral.
“We’re making your walk into town as uncomfortable as your actions make members of marginalized groups,” said one of the protesters, who he recognized as Maeve Aldaine, the undergrad who’d sat in on the city council meeting.
Looking around at the group of protesters, Husher saw they were mostly human, though there were a handful of Wingers as well as two Tumbra. He’d spent enough time around both alien species to know these were almost certainly as young as Aldaine and the other humans—so, probably all Cybele U students.
“What actions are you referring to?” Husher said, amazed at his ability to keep his tone mostly level. That session with Doctor Bancroft can’t come fast enough.
“You refused to take the Implicit Association and Bias Test, which only told us what we already knew: you don’t take this seriously at all.”
Husher inhaled slowly. “What does that have to do with my crew?”
Aldaine planted both hands on her hips, her sign floating freely above her head. “It’s not hard to tell your attitude is an indication of deep-rooted problems that run through your entire crew, which is made up of mostly humans. I can only imagine the psychological toll your attitudes must have on the Wingers, Gok, and Kaithe among the crew of the Vesta.”
“Wait,” Husher said. “I thought this had to do with just the Gok. Why are you bringing other species into it?” And why didn’t you mention the Tumbra? Husher had over three hundred Tumbran crewmembers, mostly in Engineering and Coms.
“Because it’s clear that your treatment of the Gok isn’t an isolated incident. The fact—”
“My treatment?” Husher said, his voice rising sharply. “We’ve been at war with the Gok, multiple times. It was my job to fight them!” Again, he fought to calm himself. “Ms. Aldaine, I’m not denying that we have a problem when it comes to—”
Ixan Legacy Box Set Page 4