“We ran a med sweep in the shuttle before we came back to the ship,” he said. “It’s part of why we took so long getting up from the surface.”
“So maybe you got lucky this time,” she said. “But there’s no way you can say your actions were protecting the cargo. Or the passengers. Right now, you’ve got a crew member in MedBay being tended to by a paying passenger.”
She paused and shook her head. “That’s a whole extra glueball right there. The company will have to figure out how to compensate her for taking care of staff personnel who were injured on duty. You risked your crew, and everything else, just to satisfy your curiosity.”
“It wasn’t about curiosity,” he lied. “I’m trying to make a delivery. I can’t do that if I don’t locate someone to take custody of the shipment. Going down there might have been the only way to have solved that problem.
“That’s a thin excuse and you know it,” she said, calling him on it with a frown.
“It’s not an excuse, it’s the truth.” He held his hand up to cut off another volley. “The point is, I’ve had to bring FleetCom in on this now. I don’t know what’s going on down there, but it does require that I alert the authorities.” He stood up, hoping it would give her the idea that the conversation was over. She didn’t move.
“I’ve reported this to Deep-Three, and once they decide what to do with it, we can go from there,” he said, walking toward the door. “At the least they’ll give you the legal release paperwork so we can get the cargo back to its point of origin.”
“That will involve penalties,” she said, rising from the chair and turning to face him. “And I am going to have to file a report with CSL Shipping Control. You have a seriously injured crewman and that will require some accountability.”
“For frak sake, he got overheated,” he said.
“Dr. Caldwell says hyperthermia can be life threatening. She explained that it kills a lot of people on an annual basis on Starlight. Do not try to play this off as trivial, Captain. It isn’t,” she said, lowering her voice and squaring her shoulders. He could tell she was expecting to fight him over this.
“That may be true, but right now it doesn’t matter what you do,” he said, opening the door and nodding out toward the corridor. She still didn’t move. “We are required by law to remain here until authorities release us.”
“That only applies to a site of criminal activity. Nothing says this is a crime, and even if it is, then most certainly remaining here jeopardizes the security of the ship, the cargo and the crew,” she said. “I am ready to cancel the contracts so we can return to Zone One now. Dr. Caldwell and Mr. Pruitt can make other arrangements after we return them to safety.”
“They’re not going to sit still for that,” he said, almost laughing at her preposterous suggestion.
“It doesn’t matter if they sit still or dance a jig.” She stepped up close enough he could feel her breath on his face. “If I cancel the contract, you will be obligated to return the ship and its cargo to Zone One immediately.”
“You can do that, but I will not break the law to protect company policy, or your precious contract. Without a release from the authorities, we’re going nowhere. I’ve contacted FleetCom and as soon as we know what they want us to do, we can be on our way,” he said. “So why don’t you take a deep breath and get off my ass while we wait? I’ve got a ship to run and you have paperwork to file or something.”
He pointed through the door and nodded. “We’re done.”
“You’ve got a problem with your attitude, Captain,” she said as she stepped past him into the hall. “That will go in my report.”
He shoved the door closed behind her and sighed. “And I don’t think I care.”
It would be a minimum of six days for her report to get to Zone One. If he got a comm back from Deep-Three, he’d have an answer, and probably the release, before her message got to headquarters.
Chapter Six:
When Captain Walker calmed down enough to decide it was time to eat, the only ones left on the mid-deck were his two passengers and Angelique Wolfe who sat at a discreet distance but maintained a watchful eye. Marti had told him that he’d find Kaycee and Elias waiting for him, so he snatched a bottle of his special reserve rum and three glasses from his liquor cabinet and headed down to tell them the situation.
He didn’t like the situation, and he knew they’d like it less. His only hope was the alcohol would help what he had to tell them go down easier.
“How’s Preston?” he asked, walking up and startling them both. He set the glasses on the table and poured them full before he sat down.
“He’ll be fine,” Kaycee said, picking her glass up and waiting until they’d all raised their glasses before she slammed it back like a veteran. “Once somebody gets overheated like that, it tends to make them more susceptible to future occurrences, but he’s young so he’ll bounce back.”
“That’s good news,” Walker said, pouring another round and setting the bottle down on the opposite side of the table.
“I’d recommend getting good environmentally appropriate gear before the next time he goes down,” she said.
“Unfortunately, there isn’t going to be a next time,” he said, throwing the boulder on the table right up front.
“Excuse me?” Elias asked, downing his second shot and setting his glass back on the table. “You mean no next time for him, yes?”
He shook his head. “Not for any of us. At least not until we hear back from FleetCom.”
“I expected you’d have to bring FleetCom into this,” Kaycee said. Ethan caught the significant and obviously instructional glare she shot at Pruitt. “How long will it take to get permission to investigate?”
“I reported the situation to authorities at Cygnus Deep-Three and asked them what they want us to do. It’s almost a fourteen-hour transmission lag each way so the earliest we will hear back is sometime tomorrow secondshift,” he said. “Until we receive an answer, we need to sit tight.”
“A lot could happen in twenty-eight hours,” Pruitt said.
“A lot has already happened down there,” Walker said. “Whatever happened there, it probably happened weeks ago. Another half day won’t make much difference. I know that’s not what you want to hear but until FleetCom weighs in—”
“My family is down there,” Elias said, his eyes flashing. “I need to get to them, and this isn’t something I care to debate with you, Captain.”
“I understand that,” he said. “Well honestly, maybe I don’t since I don’t have a family other than my crew. But I do know how hard it must be.”
“I don’t think you do Ethan,” Kaycee said, sounding like she was struggling to hold her own anger below the surface. “There are a hundred thousand colonists in Starlight. All of my brothers and sisters live there. My mother. My husband and my wife too.” Clouds drifted across her face and she looked down at the table.
“I know,” he said, looking down too. “I can’t do anything about it right now. I’m trying, but I just can’t.”
“Why not?” Elias growled. “This is your ship.”
“Only on paper,” the captain said. “I got my butt rather unceremoniously handed to me by my Triple-C. She made sure I understand I’m on dangerous ground.”
“We have to do something. People could be dying while we sit up here and do nothing,” Pruitt said. He grabbed the bottle, poured another dose of rum into his glass, and slammed the bottle down on the table with a solid thump.
“I don’t think so,” Walker said, shaking his head.
“What makes you say that?” he hissed as he bottomed his third drink in as many minutes.
Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to bring booze, he thought as he noticed Angel get up and move to a better position to keep an eye on them. As usual, the handler was in front of the potential problem.
Ethan let out a long slow sigh. “Not to put too a fine a point on it, but it’s an oven down there. If there were mass
ive collections of corpses, I’d have known it. By now they’d be stinking.”
Pruitt slowly swung his eyes in the captain’s direction and his face ran through a dozen expressions before it dissolved into a wall of pain.
“You can sit there and tell me you aren’t going to find out what’s going on?” Kaycee asked, acid edging into her tone.
“I can do exactly that,” he said. “I have to tread very lightly or—”
“Very lightly be damned, Ethan,” she snapped. “You cannot let her push you into ignoring your responsibilities.”
“My responsibility is to this ship, and the passengers and cargo it carries,” he said. “Solving this mystery is not on the list of things I can bite into.”
“My entire life is down there. If you won’t investigate, then let me.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“You have to,” she said.
He shook his head. “Seriously, Kaycee. From a legal standpoint you two are cargo. You contracted with Cochrane Space Logistics to carry you here. Until there’s a safe place to deliver you and Elias, I cannot sign you over. The company has the responsibility to protect you.”
“That’s pure crap,” Elias snarled.
“Actually, it’s not,” he said. “I can’t do anything about it.”
“It’s not that you can’t. You won’t,” Kaycee said.
“Leigh is the Cargo Compliance Controller. Do you know what that means?” he asked.
“Yah, she makes sure the cargo gets to where it is going,” she said.
“It’s more than that. She’s responsible for the cargo,” he said. “She’s the legal agent for CSL. She works for them and represents their authority out here where laws might otherwise be thinly interpreted.”
“So what?” Elias said.
“As a Triple-C, she has the final say in everything except ship operations,” Walker said. “If she thinks I’m risking a payload, she has the right and power to jerk my Shipmaster license and void my lease on the Olympus Dawn. She can order my first officer to pilot the vessel back to Zone One. In that situation, if any of my crew refuses her orders, she can go as far as locking me down and calling in a replacement captain to get the ship home.”
“So, she’s got your bag in a vice,” Kaycee said. “But I have the right to tell her to stuff it.”
“Sure. You can request arbitration, but she has the authority to have you arrested for your own protection. Especially if she thinks you’ve become a risk to the cargo,” he said.
“What?” Pruitt almost roared.
The captain nodded. “Protecting the cargo is her singular responsibility. That means she’s obligated to protect you too. If your behavior endangers yourself, or the other cargo, she can have you confined until we make a port where arbitration services are available.” He held up his hand to stop another explosion. “Go ahead and look it up. It is in the contract you signed before you came aboard.”
“You’re telling me that in her mind, going down to Starlight is a risk to me, and therefore the cargo,” Kaycee said.
“Yes, exactly,” he said. “Right now, she’s probably in her office writing up a formal reprimand against me because she thinks I’ve already risked your safety. She told me she will be transmitting a report to CSL headquarters outlining how she feels I’ve already jeopardized you both.”
“Howso?” she asked.
“Let’s assume for the sake of argument that there’s a virus loose on Starlight and that it’s killed everything,” he said. “If that’s true, then I’ve taken a huge chance by going to the surface.”
“But you did a medscan on the excursion party before you came back,” she said, pausing in mid-thought and shaking her head as concern flashed over her face. “You did do that, didn’t you?”
“Absolutely,” he confirmed. “I’m really not a dumb as I look.”
“It’s possible that a new infectious organism might have popped up that the bio-scan equipment wouldn’t detect. If it is a virus that means it got past the assessment survey of the planet.” Elias said, picking up the bottle to pour himself another drink. Kaycee shot him a look that caused him to put it back on the table sheepishly.
“What Leigh said is true. If that happened, and we brought it back, then I’d be responsible.”
“The odds of that are small,” she said.
“I know that,” Ethan said. “However, I have to admit that the chance of something like that is not zero. We have the best bio scanning gear we can get on a shuttle, but it’s limited. There’s only so much we can scan for.”
“Your MedBay has high-end automation but is nowhere near well enough set up to catch everything,” Elias said.
“Because we can’t guarantee the environment on the surface is safe with the tools we’ve got, any more trips down there are a hard no-go.”
“Theoretically speaking, if there wasn’t a risk of exposure, would she authorize another excursion party?” Kaycee asked.
“Probably not,” he said, shrugging. “That might take one of her arguments out from under her, but she’s a certified legal advisor. Debating is her profession, and she’d just come up with a new position to counterattack. Arguing with her is like hugging a cactus.”
“Ouch,” Pruitt said, grinning in spite of his frustration.
“It doesn’t matter, because we can’t do the science to make sure it’s safe with what we have onboard,” the captain said.
Kaycee leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms. She glanced at Elias and he nodded slightly. “I could guarantee the environment from a biological perspective. We’ve got better gear in the payload.”
“I figured you knew what we were carrying, even if you aren’t listed as a load steward on the manifest. You know you’re obligated to disclose that in the paperwork?” Ethan said, frowning. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s sealed until it’s delivered, and she’d have to vacate the contract in order to let us crack the seals.”
“You don’t think she’d allow that, even in an emergency?” he asked.
He shook his head. “In her world there are no emergencies, only bad planning. Her position would be that there’s no proof of a problem, and without that, the load is sacrosanct.”
“While people might be dying?” Elias said. His voice carried more anguish than anger this time as he gave voice to his fear again. He was clearly shredding inside.
“From her chair there’s no evidence to suggest that as a real possibility,” Ethan said. “Let’s hope she’s right.”
Kaycee nodded, “And we can’t get evidence without going down there.”
“Exactly,” the captain said. “And she won’t let us open the load to prove it is safe to go down there so we can’t get the evidence. Law lives off of the art of circular logic.”
“Nojo?” Elias asked. “She could be that callous to the potential reality?”
Ethan leaned back and sighed. “It’s not callousness. She works by rules. Order comes from enforcing the law, and she believes that the structure that comes from that is the ultimate foundation of civilization and likely the entire universe.”
“And you can work with this woman?” Kaycee asked, shaking her head.
“Normally, she is just an over-qualified shipping clerk,” he said. “In the three plus years I’ve had her as my watchdog, this is the first time we’ve gridlocked.”
“So to get her to change heading on this, we’ve got to tackle her arguments one by one,” she said.
“You can try, but I don’t think you’re going to accomplish much,” Walker said. “If you push hard enough, you might get her to agree to arbitration. But that means you don’t have your say until we get to a facility where those legal services are available. Until then, as far as she’s concerned, she is the incontrovertible representative and interpreter of law.”
“My family is down there,” Elias repeated as his face let loose and showed the torment he felt.
“Mine too,” Kaycee said, swallowing hard a
nd looking away. “Ethan, if you were in our place, what would you do?”
“Don’t put me in that position,” he said, standing up and slamming the last half of his second drink. “My whole life is this ship and everyone that’s on it is my family. You are asking me to throw my family away for the sake of finding out about yours. If I knew for sure that there was a real possibility that it would make a difference, I’d probably risk it, but…” he shook his head, leaving the rest of the thought unsaid.
He stepped back a half pace and closed his eyes for a second. “I’m sorry, but I’ve already gotten myself in way deep over this. I know how frustrating it is for you, but she’s got my hands tied. Leigh made sure I understood precisely how precarious my position is.”
Chapter Seven:
“Boss you need to report to MedBay now.”
Ethan woke from a restless night of kicking and thrashing his way through near nightmares. He wasn’t sure he’d actually heard Rene’s voice, or if it had been in a dream.
He rolled over and glanced at the chrono on his bedside shelf. Its faint illumination told him it was 0400.
“What’s up?” he asked, tentatively. If the voice had been real, he’d get a reply, and if not, then maybe he could go back to sleep.
“You need to get down here now,” he said, this time the urgency was clear in Rene’s voice.
“Is it Preston?” he asked, fear grabbing at his heart with a steel claw. Kaycee had told him he was recovering. Maybe he’d relapsed somehow?
“For the third time boss. You need to get down here quick. Before any of the rest of the crew gets here.”
“Is Preston alright?” he snarled. “Just tell me that.”
“Yah, he’s fine, but we’ve got a big problem and you need to get on top of this now,” Rene said.
“Fine I’m on my way,” he said, pushing the coverlet off and tapping the screen on his console to bring up the lights.
It took less than three minutes to get dressed and down to the mid-deck, but when he skidded to a stop at the MedBay door, he wasn’t sure he was awake enough to understand what he was looking at. It looked like a pasta processor had come apart all over everything with chunks of unrecognizable hardware strung together with ropes of opti-cables and power lines. It was a hideous mess and for all that he tried to absorb the reality of what he was seeing, he had no clue what was going on.
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 5