by Eric Warren
4
“Good job, Romeo. You pissed her off again,” Box said after the door slid closed. Cas grunted and laid back on the bed.
“How many times do I have to tell you? It wasn’t, isn’t and never will be like that with her. Not all humans pair-bond.”
“Most do.”
He sighed and sat back up on his elbows. “Do you have any hard evidence to back that up? Or are you just spouting your own personal propaganda?”
“It’s important to have a belief system. I’ve noticed most humans have one which means so do I. Humans couple. It’s what they do. It’s what most species do. Though a few couple exponentially. Some triple. Some…quadruple.” The last word came as a whisper.
“I’m glad you find it all so fascinating.” He didn’t care Evie was upset. He didn’t even care about being beaten up or needing surgical treatment. All he cared about was his singular focus—the only thing he’d wanted—moving further and further into the distance until it would be out of his reach forever. First it had been Veena and the Sargans in his way. Then he’d managed to get caught up with the Coalition again and it was supposed to be one job. One simple consulting job. And that had turned into a multi-layered mission upon itself. And now, just as he could almost grasp his freedom it had been yanked away again by some mysterious threat thousands of light years away. A threat they didn’t even know was a true threat yet or not, they had just made assumptions. And sure, the evidence didn’t look good, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was bad either.
He sighed. Who was he kidding? Of course it was a credible threat. One of the direst since the war with the Sil over a century ago. Maybe even worse. Sanghvi told them the rest of Coalition Central had been informed already, and other preparations were being made; but forging an alliance with the Sil was a crucial step if they were to have any chance of confronting whatever it was that was coming.
“I assumed because you hadn’t coupled since your time in the Sargan Commonwealth that you had bonded with the commander,” Box said, bringing Cas out of his thoughts.
“By Kor, we have more things to worry about than who I am coupling with,” Cas replied. “Don’t you understand the magnitude of what’s going on? What this means for us? We won’t be able to go off like we wanted. We have to stay.”
“And that’s bad because…?”
He sat up again. “Because we don’t like the Coalition?” Did he have to spell it out?
“No, you don’t like the Coalition. I’m just fine with them.”
“Even though they don’t see you as sentient. Most of them anyway.”
Box’s eyes blinked a few times. “Some do. The important ones. Like Commander Diazal. See the funny thing is you never asked me what I wanted. If I wanted to go off into space to explore with you. You assumed I would be there by your side. What happens if I want to stay? What happens if I happen to like the Coalition?”
“What?” Cas leaned forward causing the room to spin again. When it slowed, he continued: “Where is this coming from? If I remember correctly you were as happy to get away from them as I was. Or has everything since Kathora been a lie? We used to always talk about how if we got away from Veena and the Commonwealth we’d go off on our own, explore the galaxy.”
Box turned to him, staring him right in the eyes. “That was before we had the option of coming back to the Coalition. I was never banished; I just felt it prudent to leave for a while. And neither are you anymore. You can stay willingly. I like it here; they have centuries of media available. Centuries upon centuries. And the best part is you don’t have to pay for any of it.”
Cas made a face. “So, you like it because you can watch your shows for free?” he asked, deadpan.
“And the people are nice. Nicer than you, anyway.” He paused. “Selfish jerk.”
“What has gotten into you?” Cas asked, standing and walking over to him.
“I am an abomination no matter where I go. A sentient robot that shouldn’t exist. Most people treat me like garbage. Some don’t, and for the most part people are better to me here than in Sargan space. Don’t you understand? I don’t have a place anywhere. And ever since we lost the Excuse I don’t have a purpose anymore. I just…am.”
“You’ve never opened up like that before,” Cas said.
Box turned away from him. “I’m bored with this conversation. Go to sleep, the doctor said you need rest for your wounds.”
Cas frowned, not sure how to react. He’d always assumed Box would stay with him no matter where he went. The robot was right; he’d never asked him what he wanted. And despite the fact Cas had made the modifications that gave him greater sentience, it wasn’t as if he could go around telling Box what to do. He wasn’t his master, or even his boss anymore. Without a ship to command, Cas had been reduced to a civilian as well. He stared at the crate he knew contained all his paper maps and charts of the local star systems. A dream further out of reach.
He knew he should apologize to Box, but something about it seemed wrong. Or at least uncomfortable. And he’d been uncomfortable for long enough. “I’m going out,” Cas said, turning for the door. “I’ll be back later.”
“You better not be headed back to that bar,” Box warned. “The commander will run you through with her sword if you get smashed again.”
“No,” Cas said. “I need to do something else.”
5
His head pounding, Cas approached the security desk; the officer manning it barely glancing up. “Authorization?” the guard asked.
“Robeaux, Pi-four-seven-delta,” he replied, rattling off his old security code without a second thought.
The guard froze for a moment, then glanced up at him again under the wide brim of his hat. “Did you say Robeaux?” Cas didn’t respond, only stared at the man whose gaze was intensifying by the second. Cas was too tired and too fed-up to deal with this again. If the guard wanted to start something he’d have one hell of a fight on his hands, boomcannon or not. “Put your thumb on the pad.” His voice sounded humorless, as if he expected the pad to explode as soon as Cas touched it.
Cas did as he was told and it lit up with a soft green.
“Son of a—” the guard said. “That shouldn’t be possible.” He double-checked his feed, peering at the screen then back at Cas then back at the screen again. Another guard had appeared off to Cas’s right, standing close to the door he’d just come through. “Seems as though you have been granted access by a Lieutenant Commander Diazal. It’s a good thing it wasn’t up to—”
“—up to you otherwise you’d kick my ass, yeah, yeah. Can we just get on with it? Are you going to let me in to see him or not?” Cas asked.
The guard pursed his lips and drew back, tapping his feed monitor. “You have up to an hour. Follow Officer Blankenship.” He indicated to the other man who had taken up position by the door. Blankenship turned and crossed the room to another door, tapping it with his hand. They slid open revealing a long hallway beyond.
Cas took up stride behind the man. “And Robeaux,” the guard at the front said. “Don’t come here again. Or I’ll find a reason to stick you back in there with the rest of the trash.”
Cas rolled his eyes but kept his mouth shut and followed behind the silent Blankenship. They traversed a long corridor until they came to a familiar area, hexagonal in shape. Each wall was actually a force barrier, beyond which was a room—or in some cases, series of rooms. In the room furthest to the left was one person, sitting at a table eating from a bowl. His was the largest cell in the group, multiple rooms sharing the wall with the force barrier.
“Thanks,” Cas muttered to Blankenship, walking over and standing in front of the force barrier, willing the occupant behind it to look up and see him. Behind him Blankenship turned and left, his footfalls echoing in the hallway. “I guess they give the important people the biggest room. You look no worse for wear.”
“Can’t say the same about you. You look like a man troubled, Caspian.” He finally
lifted his head and the piercing eyes of Cas’s former captain struck him just as they had all those years ago when he’d first joined the crew. He still had his beard, though Cas could swear it had gone a shade grayer since he’d last seen the man. He had the instinct to step back, but stood his ground, not about to let this man intimidate him anymore. Despite the fact he was the reason for everything bad in Cas’s life in the past seven years. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want something,” Rutledge said. “So out with it.”
“Aren’t you even the least bit sorry? For what you did to me? For what you did to my career?” Cas asked.
Rutledge appeared to chuckle. “Of course I’m sorry. But it was for the greater good. I assume you know that by now otherwise you probably wouldn’t be here. You’d have taken off for greener pastures, just like you always dreamed.”
“I dreamed of being a starship captain,” Cas spat. “And you stole that from me.”
“You stole that from yourself!” Rutledge spat back, dropping his spoon in his bowl and standing. “All you had to do was cooperate, to trust me and see the greater picture. But no, you had to go off and let your ignorance guide you. Did it ever occur to you that I only had your best interests at heart? I never wanted anything but the best for my crew.”
“Maybe if you’d told me what we needed the weapon for I could have!” Cas yelled back.
Rutledge shook his head. “You’re deluding yourself, son. Even if I had told you, which I was under strict orders not to, would that have made any difference in your decision? Would you still not have disabled the weapons to save those people?”
Cas didn’t respond.
Rutledge sat back down. “I knew. I knew when I got you on my crew if anything morally ambiguous ever came up you’d be the first one to dissent. The first one to speak out. And back then I thought I could show you not everything in this world is so black and white. Not to mention you were one hell of an engineer and I didn’t want to be out there without you.”
“What were you developing the weapon for?” Cas asked. “The telescopes didn’t pick up the aliens until this year. Back then there was no threat, no impending doom facing the Coalition. So why take the risk?”
Rutledge smiled. “Haven’t you ever heard it’s better to be prepared than to be caught with your pants around your ankles without a belt?”
Cas furrowed his brow. He didn’t think he had heard that particular phrase before.
Rutledge blinked a few times, resetting himself. “If I sound not-quite-myself, it’s the meds they have me on in here. Messes with my mind sometimes.”
“Why are you on meds?” Cas asked.
“To keep me docile. To keep me from pounding on that force shield sixteen hours out of the day.”
“It’s not very much fun, is it?” Cas remarked, recalling the short time he’d spent in this very prison five years ago before he’d been transferred to the Dren Penal Colony. He pointed the cell directly across from Rutledge, currently unoccupied. “That one over there, remember?”
“I know,” the former admiral said. “Don’t think it doesn’t gnaw at me. The Coalition lost a good officer and I lost a good friend. I trusted you more than anyone. And you betrayed me.”
“You betrayed the Coalition,” Cas replied. “Or at least what the Coalition is supposed to be. Not what it’s become. I don’t even recognize this organization anymore.”
Rutledge scoffed. “Son, it’s always been like that. You can’t run a multi-species, intergalactic conglomeration without keeping a few dark secrets. Without making some compromises. It’s been that way since the founding days.” He paused. “But you didn’t come here to talk about ancient history. So, get on with it.”
“I want information on how you finally captured the Sil ship. The second time. After you’d already sent me to my fate.”
Rutledge sat back in his chair, a smirk on his face. “Is that all? Shit, son, I thought you were going to make this difficult. You want to know what happened, read the logs, it’s all there. Sanghvi will give you access.”
“I want your version of events,” Cas said, intent on not letting this go. Rutledge had betrayed everything he’d believed in for this weapon and if Cas was going to even try and speak with the Sil, he needed to know every detail, every nuance of what happened. Not just the scrubbed-down reports. And since the rest of the crew was dead…
“Fine,” Rutledge said, leaning back in the chair. “You want to see me squirm, is that it? Just remember I’m in here because what I was doing was right. And if you hadn’t exposed me to the council I’d still be out there, working to make the Coalition safer. But the public can’t know, so someone has to be the scapegoat. But if they’ve done what I think they’ve done, then you better watch yourself. Because you’re about to step into the shoes I just vacated.”
“What do you mean?” Cas asked.
“Dealing with the Sil is like dealing with death. No matter what you’re gonna lose people. You should know that better than anyone. And who do you think will be blamed for those deaths?”
“It won’t be my first officer, I can tell you that,” Cas replied.
Rutledge regarded him, nodding slightly, then let his chair drop back down to the floor with a thunk. “It took us six months to get the Achlys repaired after the beating we took in Sil space. And another six to outfit it with new equipment. By the time you were halfway through your sentence the ship was back out there, patrolling the edges of Sil space. But they were ready for us. They weren’t about to let us cross their borders again, not without a fight. You remember Soon? She took over as captain after they promoted me to admiral for saving the ship from your treacherous ways.”
Cas bit his lip, doing his best not to take the bait. And he did remember Soon. The first thing that came to mind was her tough demeanor and no-nonsense attitude. She’d been the Achlys’s second officer when he’d been on board and he’d been sure she would be the one to support him and stand up to Rutledge when they returned to Starbase Eight. But she’d stayed silent at his hearing, despite Cas’s pleas for assistance.
“She took the ship out for months at a time, returning only to refuel or resupply. She was looking for any advantage. Eventually she got sick of skimming the edges and plowed in where she knew their smaller ships were likely to patrol. She got a scout ship to pursue her to the Atrax system, familiar with it?”
Cas shook his head.
“Surprising. I thought you explorers knew every system.” Rutledge stood and grabbed a water from the dispenser beside the table. “Atrax is a very unique system. At the center a star collapsed into a black hole, but three of the planets orbiting Atrax Alpha remained in orbit, even after the star’s collapse, hundreds of thousands of years ago. The whole system, frozen in a perfect balance, each planet keeping the other two from falling into the gravity well.”
“I don’t like where this is going,” Cas said.
“Soon was clever. Cleverer than I was at any rate. She’d already mined one of the planets with explosives on the surface. All she had to do was detonate, knocking the planet just a degree out of alignment, which threw everything into chaos. Soon was prepared for it, the Sil were not. And in the confusion, she was able to tractor their ship and blow their pressure holds. The ten souls on board were sucked into space and presumably into the black hole along with the planets. She destroyed an entire star system to get that ship, and she barely made it out in one piece. But you know what? Because of her quick-thinking and strategy, the Sil never had a chance to call the others. They don’t know we took it and they probably still list the ship as lost today.”
Soon had done that? Killed ten innocent Sil?
“I don’t believe it,” Cas said.
“Believe it, son, it’s all in the reports,” Rutledge said. “Right down to the coordinates. Black hole’s still there if you want to go visit, but the whole system is fucked up now. Eddies and gravitational currents all over the place.”
“What if there ha
d been life on one of those planets?”
“Cas, they were orbiting a black hole. They were dead, trust me.” Rutledge sat back down, sipping his water.
“So, then what, she just brings the ship back and you start working on it?” Cas asked.
He shook his head. “We couldn’t risk someone seeing it. That’s why we had that drydock constructed out in neutral space. She took it there, and I met the ship with a team dedicated to taking that ship apart and learning her secrets. And we did, it just turned out we didn’t know as much as we thought we did.” He leaned forward. “There is something strange about those ships. Enough to even make me pause. But we had a mission. We had to make a weapon. But trying to figure that ship out was like unwrapping an enigma stored inside a mystery.”
Cas remembered seeing all the dust on the drydock and the Achlys when they’d investigated. There had been so much it had piled up in the corners, like they had become some ancient tombs, lost in the desert.
“She was on the Achlys when they tested the weapon. In fact, I talked to her before I sent Evie to retrieve you,” Rutledge said. “I guess their deaths are on my head too.”
“You’re damn right they are,” Cas said.
Rutledge snapped his gaze to Cas. “I don’t care what you think. The fact is I was right. We needed that weapon because now we’re staring down the barrel of something we don’t even understand and I can guarantee, had it worked, I’d be on the other side of this field right now preparing to install them on all our ships.” He dropped his head. “If these aliens turn out to be as dangerous as they look—”
“—we’re all dead anyway,” Cas said, taking a deep breath. He’d seen the footage. He’d seen what they could do. The Coalition had nothing anywhere near as powerful.
“Now you’re getting it.”
6
Cas left the high-security brig with a bigger headache than when he’d entered. His encounter with Rutledge had drained him, but he wasn’t ready to return to his room yet. There was something he needed to do first.
