by BL Craig
William looked blankly at the man for a moment. Perlin reached into a trouser pocket and pulled out the blue nexus that William had carried with him for the duration of his navy service. William had not realized the Captain had even found time to forward the request. He had not had any real hope it would be honored when received. He took the nexus gingerly, not daring to speak.
Perlin must have seen the suspicion on William’s face. “The company isn’t cruel, Mr. Butcher. Believe it or not, AfterLife’s goal is always to be as humane as possible.”
But what exactly did humane mean when applied to the undead?
* * *
…
* * *
John felt like an idiot clinging to the side of the station. Not as much of an idiot as William. John was wearing a space suit. But surely, someone was going to notice him here. He hoped Alex was right and no one was scheduled to dock nearby. He saw the little beacon start flashing as the outer door opened. He pulled himself into the airlock and clipped the crate to his second tether. Sarah gave him a thumbs up from the other side of the airlock window.
He shoved off, reeling in the tether to the Tilly, towing Leyla and her bed of Karl Marx back to the ship.
* * *
…
* * *
“What the fuck is project Cerberus?” Brooks blurted out before anyone else could.
William held tightly to the nexus in his pocket while the Captain explained.
“Evidently, after the Cosi showed up, AfterLife was a bit more proactive than anyone anticipated. They commissioned a small FTL-capable fleet of cruisers, destroyers, and fighters made just for reanimates. They’re incognito out in the Styx system.”
“That explains all the transfers from Yan Luo a couple of years back,” Leyla added. “Most of the construction crew were taken away. We were told they were prepping Follette-9, but we’ve never worked that way before.”
“Well, this does solve the problem of getting Leyla into the hands of the resistance at Tartarus. It’s right on the way to Styx. If we use minimum capacitor recharge times the company will never know we detoured.”
“And Jason is the Admiral?” Sarah asked, confusion wrinkling her brow.
“Yes, turns out right after the Tilly left Elysium the Mikki was sent to Styx. Jason was the most experienced military commander available.”
“Did you know about this?” asked Brooks.
“No,” said the Captain, “nor did Jason. This was all hush-hush.”
“And they want us to go retrieve this super-secret undead war fleet?” Sarah asked.
“Yes,” said the Captain. “We’ve been given a special right-of-way to the use the gates all the way to Eden. Once we notify the flagship cruiser Morrigan to mobilize the fleet at the edge of the Mirada system, we’re to turn right around and report on their ETA.”
“What about the Mikki and the Tilly? Will we go back to surveying after this business is over,” asked Addy with suspicion in his voice.
“Perlin wasn’t clear on that subject,” the Captain said disapproval thick in her voice. “He said that Jason took most of the Mikki crew with him to Cerberus. He said that the company did not plan to separate Jason and me, but he would not commit to anything about the rest of the crew and the ships.”
They all sat with that a moment. William had been there during Elva’s interrogation of the limpid little administrator. The man had been cagey in the extreme.
“Should we detour to Tartarus if time is so crucial?” Addy asked.
“We’ll do that on the way back. It won’t make a difference in the fleet mobilization and the Tilly getting back a few hours later won’t make any difference.”
“What if the Cerberus fleet gets there before we do?” asked Brooks.
“It won’t, even on alert, a fleet takes time to get underway. We should get gate clearance any minute. Everyone to stations.”
The group broke up and headed their separate ways. Sarah placed a gentle hand on his shoulder as she turned to head to the maintenance core, a soft smile on her face. “You OK? You look upset?”
He pulled the lightly battered nexus out of his pocket and held it up. “I guess my past has caught up with me,” he smiled wanly.
“Ah,” she said.
“Would you hold on to it for me?” he asked. “I don’t trust myself not to start flipping through it on duty.”
“Sure” She slipped the nexus into an inner pocket in her battered overalls. “I’ll keep it right here.” She patted the spot over her left breast.
“Thanks,” he said, turning to go.
Her hand reached out and brushed past his as they walked opposite directions, fingers gliding over his palm and then away.
* * *
…
* * *
Getting to the gate proved to be simple. Traffic control ushered them through with nary a word of protest. Once in the gate, the view of the planet and stars vanished, replaced by the endless shifting grey nothing of the wormhole. The transition through the gate was markedly less unpleasant than it had been before William died. His stomach appeared to have given up the ghost and resigned itself to atrophy.
He finished up watch on the bridge and returned to his cabin. He found Sarah there standing on a stepladder spraying primer on the wall using a miniature pneumatic gun of some sort. Evidently, she had decided to paint something on his wall. He had looked through her portfolio, viewing the side-by-sides of her work and the ones that inspired her. He disagreed with her self-classification as a “hack”. Her paintings looked more like a response, even a dialog with the original works. Though thematically and stylistically different from each other, he could nonetheless see the Sarah-ness in every one of them. They were playful, irreverent, even antagonistic in some cases. The years of being dragged to openings and galleries by Carly and her friends had rubbed off on him more than he realized.
She finished roughing out the area she was working on and turned to him, disassembling the nozzle on the device and dropping it into a cup of liquid. “Do you like it?” she asked, “I’m calling it,” her voice dropped to a mysterious whisper and she spread her arms looking up at the imaginary heavens, “To Be Decided!”
“A tour de force. 5 stars,” he responded with mock enthusiasm and aristocratically clapping the fingers of his left hand to the palm of his right rapidly.
“So,” she said dryly, “excited for the war?”
“Secret undead resistance, corporate intrigue, hidden fleet, aliens, impossibly deactivated wormholes,” he shrugged. “What’s a little war?”
“That’s the spirit!” she said, bouncing off the ladder.
“Is there any other monumental, world-breaking information I should know?”
“World-breaking? Probably not. The Tilly is a survey vessel, so we’re vital to all sorts of clandestine activities. The company would have us all droned in a heartbeat if they knew. I’m actually, sort of, a super double agent . . . only it’s not super at all.”
“Not at all super double agent?”
“Well, I am a former professor of social anthropology. Despite our joking before, AfterLife does have a use for scholars, historians included. If you ask, you can get assigned a course of study for history or just go the self-taught route. One guy I know actually finished his dissertation after dying. We pulled together a committee of advisors and everything. It’s not an accredited degree, but he did the work and passed the defense. Anyway, I do analysis and review for the company pretty often, and like I told you before, I’ve been collecting data, not just demographics. I’ve got first person interviews and ethnographies for the last ten years. The resistance uses some of my research to help organize, recruit, and build a sense of unique identity around undeadness and AfterLife pays me extra credits to do it.”
“I was just terribly impressed by you before. Now I’m starting to feel intimidated. Are you secretly an assassin, too?”
She slid her arms around his neck. Leaning in, she whispered
, “You’ll never know, until it’s too late.” Then she giggled and blew a raspberry on his neck.
He reached his arms around her waist drawing her all the way in against him. Then he felt the hard rectangle inside the overalls. He stiffened thinking about the nexus with all its pictures and videos and years-worth of messages. A whole life. A short life, but the one that had been his. He was not sure he wanted to look any more.
“Do you want it back now,” she asked, her head resting on his shoulder, her breath on his neck.
“I don’t know why I’m so nervous about it. It’s not like I don’t know everything on there.” Probably not everything, he thought. The nexus had been on when he died. It may have stayed powered up for days, receiving messages and updates and probably several alerts about his own death. He had no idea where it had gone after he died. Maybe it just sat in an AfterLife storage locker or maybe the company had got it back from someone on Eden, maybe his mother had had it. He wouldn’t know until he turned it on.
“Well, can I distract you with sex while you decide?”
“That is a fantastic idea.”
* * *
…
* * *
Later, while Sarah slept, he turned on the nexus. The first message he came across was an urgent reminder to report to the shuttle port for his return trip to the Indigo Star, his last posting. After Mirada and the press blitz, he had been reassigned to the Eden system fleet. A plum position close to home that would allow him regular leave. He had never actually set foot on the Indigo Star, accepting the offer of personal leave before reporting to his new job. After that, he saw an alert for the death of one William Butcher flagged as “possible family member? Some VI really needed tweaking. So much about being dead was weird, mostly because being dead was an awful lot like being alive, only not.
The nexus had clearly been active for a few days. His social feeds were full of shocked responses to the tragically dead William Butcher. Most were from secondary schoolmates he had known casually, some from actual friends who had drifted apart. A second group consisted of fellow junior navy officers, academy graduates, a few he had served with. They used words like “hero” and “bravery” in their terse posts. There was a genuinely touching post from his best friend Chris. It ended in typical Chris fashion: “This fucking sucks.” William laughed through stinging eyes.
In the comments he saw a reply from Carly. “Yes, you’ve summed it up perfectly. Everything fucking sucks.”
Carly was a regular poster of images and quotes she found interesting, but rarely her own words. Instead, she had posted a picture of William from his last leave before Mirada. He was ringed in a halo of light, looking off into the middle distance with an expression of melancholic profundity on his face. He laughed out loud, causing Sarah to shift in her sleep. Carly had managed one last in joke at the end. Only he and she knew that she had captured that shot right after he had stepped in dog shit at the park. The look on his face not contemplation of existence but rather the dawning awareness of a less than delightful smell. Now, he held his hand over his mouth, snickering. He read the comments friends, acquaintances, and one distant cousin had made on the photo. “Such a beautiful boy.” “A true friend.” “Always so thoughtful.” And his personal favorite, “Forever Young.” Good god, cousin Rhea, he thought, you have no fucking clue. Not forever, but maybe for a few centuries, if he didn’t die in the coming war. How appropriate: survive battle, get killed by a waiter, get reanimated. Die in a war. He giggled a little under the hand at his mouth.
Feeling well steeped in the absurdity of life, he pulled up his photos. There she was, fluffy chestnut hair falling in waves over her shoulders. Huge brown eyes. Million-watt smile. A tiny mole just past her left eye. She was reaching out toward the viewer inviting a big warm hug. His chest tightened, and this time the tears came. Not the great heaving sobs of the last time he’d been overwhelmed by grief. These were quiet, more like real tears. He set the nexus down and pressed his face into the bed. This was so irretrievably messed up. Through the tangle of emotions guilt rose to the top. He felt guilty. He had betrayed someone, but who? The vibrant young woman in the photo with whom he was very much still in love and who he would never see again? Or the woman who lay beside him? Was he cheating on his almost-fiancé with the woman who was fast becoming his best and only friend? Or was he cheating on the woman he just made love to with the memory of the other?
Yes, he thought, everything fucking sucks.
13
Transfer
As a living man, Jason Bridger had dreamed of one day wearing Admirals stars. He could not have imagined realizing that dream some 50 years after he died. Now he stood on the deck of the Morrigan, a truly fearsome cruiser and flag ship of the Cerberus Fleet. “By all the saints,” he’d said upon hearing his new assignment, “AfterLife and its bloody names.” The ship name was apt, though. The raven goddess of doom, death, and battle. The Morrigan was surely that. All engines, guns, and speed. The ships had clearly been designed from the keel up to be used by the dead. Any job that would have been done by enlisted personnel was being done by drones. Jason had expressed his doubts but in his brief time aboard he had started to wonder if it was not the officers who were superfluous. He remembered having the same thoughts as a FirstLife officer.
Jason’s new fleet was a machine of war. The ship had next to no crew quarters, no heads, no gallies, no food storage, and no rec spaces. The scant dozen crew of his Mikki had more space than the 200 drones aboard the Morrigan. The designers of the war ship had used every bit of their space for practical purposes. The Morrigan had almost twice the weapon load out of a standard cruiser, and the engines to power those guns. More It was the FTL capabilities, though, that would make his small fleet outfight any twenty Navy ships. They had multiple banks of capacitors enabling the ships to make short FTL hops in rapid succession. The Morrigan could jump away from an enemy, reappear right behind it, fire, and jump again. The three smaller destroyers, Babd, Macha, and Nemain were likewise equipped. The destroyers were each worth several standard cruisers. Then there were the fighters.
The Shinigami class fighters attached to the Morrigan and the destroyers lacked FTL capability but had nimble parallel sub-light engines that allowed for incredibly quick turns. The pilots had been in training since the fleet’s construction had been ordered. Jason had been surprised to discover that the pilots were also drones. The supervisors had spent years fine tuning decision trees and no doubt mucking with the NCMs to find a perfect balance. The pilots seemed to live entirely in the now. They were fully focused in the cockpit and completely passive when off duty. Jason found their passivity deeply saddening. This was not how he wanted to command. Initially he had been relieved to discover there were no marines in the fleet. Then he realized that this fleet was not meant to leave behind survivors.
On the display he could see the rest of the fleet still under construction: another cruiser, four more destroyers, and a truly terrifying battleship. Some were just skeletons, while others were nearly complete. AfterLife had commissioned the fleet shortly after first contact with the Cosi. The existence of another FTL capable species had, evidently, lit a fire under the bottom-line-oriented bureaucrats. Now that they had a fleet of war machines, he wondered how long would it be before a use was found for it.
Pacing the deck, Jason cut an imposing figure in his new uniform. Tall and burly he looked like a brawler. The bushy beard somewhat undercut the clean military look, evoking a mad 19th century sea Captain. The beard had always been neatly trimmed when he served in the Navy, but he had used early retirement via death as an excuse to let it go wild. Elva often joked he was incubating birds’ eggs inside the twisted curly jungle.
He had spent the last two months learning the new fleet’s capabilities and staffing out the cruiser and the destroyers. AfterLife had selected pilots, engineers, and gunners, but had let him pick from the Hades Fleet and staff on Styx and Tlalocan for his command crews. Or at least fr
om those Hades ships currently reachable and in range. The pickings were slim. AfterLife kept their most experienced officers in the field. Still, they had clearly been planning ahead and kept a number of vessels in ports nearby, delaying survey missions, and rerouting cargo vessels. The teams were coming together, but they were almost universally untested as military units.
Jason was more worried about the Navy than his fleet’s performance. He had been born Navy, and he knew how much they resented the dead’s ability to travel in FTL. There had been so many attempts to make it work that they had stopped using human subjects long before Jason was born. He was sure that the discovery of the Cosi had spurred a whole new generation of fleet scientists certain they had the answer. They just needed a little funding, a little time, a little more. And now AfterLife had a fleet. A fleet not just with FTL but with FLT combat capabilities. There was going to be pushback.
With dark thoughts clouding his mind, Jason sat down in his chair as the chime for a special alert he had set went off. The Tilly had just jumped into Styx system and was parking above the Morrigan. “Admiral,” his comms officer spoke up, “We have contact from the Mictecacihuatl.”
Jason tapped the console and put the image on the admiral’s display. “Mictecacihuatl, you have Morrigan actual.”
Elva’s sardonic expression spoke mountains. “I see that,” she said. “Admirals usually have Flag Captains to run their ships.”
“Well, you know me, can’t stand to let anyone else run the show, mi amor. So, we’re in it now, I take it?”
“Corporate says the Cerberus Fleet is to make all due haste, via gate where possible, to Mirada, and park at the edge of the system, out of sight. We’re transferring the report of what we found on Rannit One . . . and other places. The Tilly is to turn around immediately and report on when Cerberus Fleet can be expected to arrive.”
