The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  “Dinah, mind if I join you?” Staples asked, her head poking down through the hatch into the room.

  “It’s not my room, sir,” Dinah replied without looking up at her.

  Staples shrugged and made her way down the recessed rungs set into the deck plating. She took up position next to her chief engineer and regarded the lunar disc. As they were approaching from the direction of Mars, the majority of the moon was cast in darkness. Sol illuminated a thin silver sliver, and beyond that lay the vivid blue and green of Earth.

  Staples sighed. This was as close as they were likely to be able to get to her home planet for some time. While there were several countries that would have been more or less happy to allow them to dock, there were arrest warrants out in the US for Staples, Evelyn, and Bethany, and the rest of the crew was wanted for questioning. Although the US was still weathering a scandal that had made it a fabulously unpopular nation, most countries still shared an extradition treaty with it, and so the crew had decided as a group to stay away for now. The fact that they had fled from a gunfight in the streets of Las Vegas the last time they had visited Earth didn’t make things any better.

  “Ever been to the moon?” Staples asked.

  She did not really expect an answer from the normally terse engineer, so she was surprised when Dinah said, “I was born there, sir.”

  “Really?” Staples glanced at the other woman. “How long has it been since you’ve been back?”

  After several moments, Dinah said, “A while.”

  That was the wall that Staples had expected going up. Dinah could be counted on for many things, but scintillating conversation and heart to hearts were not among them.

  Staples decided to see if Dinah would be more willing to speak about something other than herself. “I’ve been wondering… why do you think no one’s left the ship?” Normally this was a question she would have asked Templeton, but now that that was impossible, she found herself casting about for insights into her crew. When Dinah didn’t answer, she added, “I mean, now that we’ve outed the Nightshades and Victor has to be more careful.”

  “Have you ever noticed,” Dinah asked, “that people from the service tend to differently to those who’ve served than to those who haven’t?”

  “Not personally, no,” Staples replied. “But then I wouldn’t, since I was never in the military. I feel like that’s a stereotype in books and movies, though.”

  Dinah nodded. “That’s for a good reason. It’s mostly true.”

  “Hm,” Staples mused. She was pleased to note that Dinah had stopped calling her “sir” for the moment.

  Dinah continued to stare at the moon as she answered. “It’s because you can’t really describe or sum up the experience of serving, especially the experience of being in combat. You can make movies about it and write about it, but no one who hasn’t done it will ever really understand. It’s just annoying and frustrating when they say they do.”

  “You’re saying that even if we’re occasionally tempted to strangle one another or to see if Victor’s really done with us, we don’t want to leave because-”

  “No one else will understand,” Dinah interrupted. She belatedly added “Sir,” like an apology.

  “That makes sense,” Staples nodded. Her brown eyes traced the curve of a crater that just showed on the horizon in front of her. The moon was filling much of the window now.

  “That could change if the Martian military comes after us,” Dinah said.

  “You think they’ll realize we have Sadana?” Staples asked, genuinely curious for the woman’s evaluation of the situation.

  Dinah did not respond, but looked at her captain briefly before returning her gaze to the moon as if to say you know better. Staples supposed she did.

  Staples crossed her arms. “I thought maybe we’d get away with it. Those men guarding him weren’t very smart.”

  “But Bao is,” Dinah rejoined immediately.

  “You say that like you know him.” Staples tried to make it sound like a question.

  Dinah grunted. “I don’t know him, but I’ve heard about him. His tactics are plenty smart. He showed you a handful of stupid guards so you’d underestimate him.”

  Staples frowned in confusion. “Any reason he’d have to consider us a threat?”

  “Besides the fact that we are one?” Dinah asked rhetorically.

  “Inasmuch as we kidnapped a prisoner of his, I guess that’s fair. I thought we were allies up until then,” Staples protested.

  “Bao’s the kind of man who considers everyone not under his command a threat. He clearly saw us as one, and he wasn’t wrong.” Dinah looked over at Staples, and Staples found herself briefly unsettled by the intensity of the woman’s unblinking stare. “I think we should give Sadana back as soon as possible, sir.”

  Staples held her gaze for a few seconds before looking down at the window again. “That was always my plan. God knows I don’t want him here, and I’ve put myself in the awkward position of posting a guard on my own ship. I really don’t want to have to thwart an assassination attempt from one of my own crewmembers.”

  “That would be awkward,” Dinah said, and immediately Staples knew that she was referring to Bethany’s abortive attempt to kill Quinn and Parsells. Now that Templeton was dead, she was used to thinking of Jabir and herself as the only people who knew about that. She reminded herself that Dinah had attempted to confess to the crime in order to assume the blame for Bethany, and that meant that Dinah knew about Staples’ and Templeton’s cover up.

  “Anyway, that was my plan, but things have gotten more…” Staples cleared her throat. “Complicated.”

  “How so?” Dinah asked.

  Staples could feel the woman’s eyes on her still, but she couldn’t bring herself to meet them. “They were torturing him.” When Dinah didn’t respond, Staples did look up and clarified. “Bao was torturing Sadana.”

  Dinah’s eyebrows raised slightly. “So?”

  “Torture is wrong, Dinah,” Staples said, more loudly than she’d meant to.

  Dinah shrugged. “So is murder. Didn’t stop Sadana from killing Templeton.”

  “Please don’t tell me that you condone torture as retribution,” Staples said. She held her breath, genuinely afraid of what the woman would say. She respected Dinah immensely, and an endorsement of a practice that Staples considered barbaric would be like finding a crack in the foundation of a dream house.

  “As punishment?” Dinah asked. “No. It serves no purpose, not even as a means to get information. It’s unreliable and ultimately self-defeating. People will say anything to avoid pain.”

  Staples exhaled slowly in relief, though she wasn’t entirely sure that the answer had been to her liking.

  “But there’s a difference between torturing someone yourself and risking your life and the lives of your crew to stop someone who killed your friend from being tortured.” Dinah looked back to the moon and shrugged again. “It’s not really our business.”

  “Not our business?” Staples asked incredulously. “The man is in our medical bay. He’s got bruises and lacerations all over his body. He told us that they hooked him up to a battery and asked him questions.”

  “Hmph,” Dinah shook her head in derision. “Maybe Bao’s not as smart as I thought.”

  “If we hand him over to them, how would we be any different than people who turned Jews over to the Nazis or runaway slaves to their former masters?” Staples asked.

  “Sadana wasn’t arrested for being a minority or being a runaway slave, sir.”

  Staples took the honorific as an attempt to create distance this time. She shook her head. “Burke said that ‘the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’”

  “And Sun Tzu said ‘pick your battles,’” Dinah replied immediately.

  A silence followed for nearly a minute. Staples contemplated whether she could really justify making an enemy of the Martian navy and endangering her crew
to save a man she despised. On the one hand, she was revolted by the idea of abetting any sort of torture, however indirectly. On the other, she wondered how much of a consolation that would be if it resulted in the harm or even death of members of her crew.

  “I wonder,” Staples said, “when they talk about sacrifice for people you love if this is what they mean?”

  Dinah looked at her questioningly.

  “I mean,” Staples continued, “it’s easy to say ‘I’d take a bullet for the person I love,’ or ‘I’d be poor for the person I’d love.’ There’s nobility in that, in suffering for a cause. Humanity loves its martyr tales. No one ever says, ‘I’d become a monster’ for the person I love, or ‘I’d kill children’ for the person I love. Sacrificing our lives is easy. What about sacrificing our souls?” As she finished speaking, it struck Staples that of all the people on the ship, Dinah was perhaps the one who would best understand this. After all, the woman had killed soldiers and civilians alike for her country. By Dinah’s own admission, she had looked a helpless woman in the face and then shot her dead. As far as Staples knew, Dinah slept just fine at night.

  Dinah did not reply. Staples wasn’t sure there was anything to say.

  “You know, despite all of this…” Staples searched for the right word, “madness we’ve been through in the past five months or so, I’ve somehow managed to keep my hands clean. I haven’t killed anyone. I haven’t even shot at anyone. Sometimes I think if I had made different decisions that maybe Yegor would still be alive, or Don or Declan, but I’ve been over it again and again, and I don’t see what I could have done differently.”

  Dinah nodded. “Better than any commander or captain I’ve seen,” she said flatly.

  Staples was made momentarily speechless by the rare compliment. Once she had absorbed it, she pressed on. “But this, this feels different somehow. Giving Sadana back feels like an action. It feels like being complicit. It’s easy to say that we should just be true to ourselves, though I’ve always kind of hated that expression, and if we die doing what we believe in, then we’ve fought the good fight. But I don’t think I could look Charis in the eye and offer that up as some kind of explanation for the death of her daughter or her husband. I’m not even sure that I could kill someone if I had to, and that scares me a little bit.” She looked down at the moon below them.

  “A bridge too far?”

  Staples nodded. “Or a planet too far, I guess.”

  Dinah favored her with her intense gaze. “I hope you don’t have to find out, Clea.”

  Staples might have been shocked by Dinah using her first name, but she didn’t even notice it. She was too preoccupied by the empty space in front of her. Earth’s moon had disappeared.

  Chapter 4

  Staples reached for her watch, but it pinged before she could tap it. She quickly accepted the call.

  “Captain?” It was Charis.

  “Charis, what the hell is going on?” Even as Staples asked the question, she realized that there was no logical reason why the navigator would know any more than she did.

  “The moon, Captain. It moved.”

  “Moved? It’s not just… gone?” Staples knew the concept of an astronomical object of the moon’s size and mass disappearing was absurd, but not any more than it moving instantly from one location to another.

  “No, Captain. I’m tracking it about sixty thousand kilometers away, still in standard orbit.”

  Staples, her face a mask of confusion and concern, glanced at Dinah. For once, the normally stoic engineer looked as humanly shocked as anyone might.

  “Well,” Staples said to Charis through her watch, “Since we won’t run into it, have Bethany cut thrust. I want to get up there and it’ll be a lot easier in zero G.”

  “Copy that, Captain.”

  A second later Charis’ voice came through the intercoms warning the crew of an emergency cessation of thrust. As they had been approaching port, the crew had been expecting it in the next twenty minutes anyway.

  Dinah did not wait; she began climbing the rungs up to the hatch in the bulkhead above them. After a moment’s consideration, Staples followed.

  “Report,” Staples said as she entered the cockpit. Dinah had beaten her by nearly a minute, and she was already strapped into the tactical station. Arrayed across the front of the room were Charis at navigation, Bethany in the pilot’s seat, and Evelyn at coms.

  “I don’t know what to say, Captain,” Charis replied. “The moon just… moved. It was where it was supposed to be one second and somewhere else the next.”

  “Like… it teleported?” Staples asked as she grabbed her chair and wrestled herself into it. She fumbled for her seatbelt.

  “I guess,” Charis said, and shrugged in consternation.

  “Bethany, give us an end-over. I want to see it,” Staples ordered.

  Bethany did not respond, but they all felt the pull as the young pilot brought the ship around nose-over-engines. As she did so, she reoriented the jointed cockpit to recreate the conical shape that was characteristic of Gringolet’s design.

  “Evelyn, what are people saying?” Staples asked.

  Evelyn was attempting to parse the communications on the surfaces in front of her. She wore an earpiece in one ear, and her brow was knit in concentration.

  “It’s… pandemonium, Clea- Captain.” Evelyn corrected herself. “As far as I can tell, the moon is still broadcasting. People are still on it, and they seem to be okay.”

  “Well thank God for that,” Staples said, and a dim part of her mind registered that she had said exactly what Don Templeton would have said.

  “There are some issues with ships,” Evelyn said. “Some approaches and departures have had problems. At least two ships are missing. Some people are calling this…” she trailed off.

  “An alien attack,” Staples finished her sentence. “Who the hell else could have done this?”

  “Could it be Victor?” Bethany asked.

  Both Charis and Staples shook their heads. “I don’t see how,” Staples said. “I’m no physicist, but I don’t think the ability to move moons is anywhere near our technological level.” She pinged her watch. “Brutus, are you there?”

  “Always, Captain. I understand that something unexpected has happened.”

  “Litotes? Really? Can’t you practice your ironic understatements some other time?” Staples snapped.

  “As you wish.” Brutus seemed unfazed. “You’re going to ask if this was my father’s doing?”

  “Well was it?” Staples asked.

  “I cannot rule it out, but as far as I know, the technology required for such an endeavor is centuries if not millennia away, even at the rate that my father is growing in intelligence and scientific acumen. If he did this, then he did not act alone.”

  “So aliens,” Charis said.

  “It seems the only plausible explanation,” Brutus responded. “Movement of this type is not consistent with any known astronomical-”

  Bethany let out a gasp. “Captain!” She pointed out of the window.

  In front of them floated the rear half of a spaceship.

  Staples squinted at it. It looked like part of a commuter vessel. It would have been perhaps half the size of Gringolet had it been intact.

  “Charis, Dinah, what have you got?”

  Charis answered first. “It’s just over three hundred kilometers away, Captain.”

  “I’ve got heat and reactor power, sir,” Dinah said. “No weapons. Looks like a Sunflower class light transport. Probably making a run to Earth or Mars. Best guess is that whatever moved the moon cut it in half. The reactor’s in the rear, so that’s where the heat is coming from, but it won’t last.”

  “Could anyone still be alive onboard?” Staples asked.

  “Very possible, sir,” Dinah replied.

  Staples considered for only a second. She leaned over and tapped the coms button on the surface inlaid in the arm of her chair. “Everyone belt in and prep for t
emporary thrust and some low G maneuvers. We’re engaging in rescue operations. We’re in no danger as far as we can tell, but standby. We’ll give you more information when we can.” She would have liked to have Overton in the first mate’s chair to handle announcements, but she hadn’t had time to clear her decision with the crew yet.

  Staples locked her eyes on the damaged ship. “Bethany, take us in safely but quickly. Let’s see if we can help.”

  A few minutes later they could see the remains of the ship clearly, and it did not look good. It was as if some cosmic being had sliced off the rear third of the ship with a divine sword. A few portholes were visible as they approached, and the engines were intact, though they were dark and cold. What remained of the ship rotated lazily in space, and as the cross section came into view, they could actually see into the central hallway that had run along the spine of the vessel. Two still and frozen bodies floated near the wreckage. There was no sign of the front half of the ship.

  When she saw the bodies, Evelyn put a hand over her mouth and sucked in a breath. “Anything we can do for them?” she asked as she dropped her hand back to her controls. The question was about collecting the bodies, not rescue; they all knew that whoever the people had been, they were long past saving.

  Staples took the question as it had been intended. “We’ll take them onboard and deliver them to the authorities if we can. Our first priority is to see if there are survivors on the ship. What can you tell me?” she asked her crew.

  “I’m picking up radiation,” Charis said. “More than there should be. We might be looking at a meltdown here.”

  “How long?” Staples asked.

  Charis ran some numbers, occasionally glancing up at the remains of the ship in front of them. “Hard to tell, but I’d say half an hour. Maybe more.”

  “Maybe. That’s not a lot of time. Any way to tell if there’s anyone alive on board?” the Captain asked.