by G. P. Eliot
“I know what he has done, believe me, I know,” Lory said–and the savage tone in her voice made Hank look up and straight into her eyes. They were serious and uncompromising.
“But this isn’t the way. Think of all of the ways that we could use him for information. Think of how important he is to the Elites,” Lory argued.
That, at least, made sense to Hank. His resolve waivered. He knew that they still had to decode the rest of the Message and use it to find out where it went. The Elites were not going to like that at all. They would come for him and his crew. And they would probably bring with them the entire weight of the Union military arsenal with them, as well.
But then, Lory’s next words really did hit home. “And what is worse, Hank–don’t turn yourself into him by stooping to his level.”
Hank reeled on his feet as if she had slapped him.
Turn myself into him? he thought, as he recalled the Jackal’s words. That both he and the Jackal were similar. They were like rats together, weren’t they? They survived. They wagered and gamed the odds, and always came out on top.
Hank saw something in the Jackal’s eyes as they stared up at him, one hand clamped to his own throat, attempting to get the oxygen to filter correctly into his weakened lungs.
It was a sort of recognition.
How far are you willing to go for your aims? Hank silently asked the man. Could Lory in fact be right? Was the Jackal just as driven and as committed–stubborn–as Hank himself was?
And was the Jackal addicted to violence in the same way that I am–was –addicted to stimulants? Hank had to force himself to consider.
Captain Snider did not see any kindred spirit or moment of empathy inside the Jackal in that moment, but he thought that he might have understood the man better. Which made it really hard to kill him in cold blood.
There is an emptiness in the pit of your soul, just like in mine, isn’t there, Jackal? Hank thought to himself. That was the real reason why he got addicted to gambling and alcohol and stimulants. Because there were so few times in his life that he even felt alive anymore. It was only being here, surrounded by the crew of the Dalida and taking on this impossible mission that made him feel electric, and worthwhile. Useful.
Maybe it was the same for the Jackal, in his own twisted way.
Hank’s hand shook, and suddenly Lory’s own bare hand was cool over his own, gently taking the pistol out of his grip. “He’s our hostage now. We have the Message and Serrano and the Ubix crystal. We have all the cards.” She said.
Hank let out a long, slow breath, and released all of his pent-up fury at the same time. “Just so long as I don’t have to look at his face,” Hank muttered, turning away. “Somebody, take that man to the Brig.”
“Aye-aye, Captain!” it was Steed and Madigan, entering the Bridge now that the Jackal’s controls had gone. The two men seized the gasping and panting Jackal by each arm and were not gentle about dragging him out.
Phew. Hank groaned, hitting the release on his helmet and running his hands through his hair. “It’s over. It’s finished.” He said.
“Not quite, Captain…” said a voice. It was Serrano, staggering to his feet and gesturing to his and Cortez’s field cuffs. “As soon as we get these off, I am sure that the increased power matrix of the Ubix Crystal will help me to decrypt the rest of the Message.” The Professor said, grinning despite the impressive black eye that he now wore.
“And then, with any luck we can follow the Message to its final coordinates. We can find what we started this whole adventure looking for!”
Hank nodded, as Lory moved to deactivate the cuffs. He knew that he should be pleased, but right now, the Captain of the Dalida only felt tired. He collapsed back into the command chair with a heavy sigh.
“All I want about now is a very stiff drink, Professor,” he said.
40
Hank stood in the Captain’s Ready Room of the Dalida, that sat just off the Bridge and afforded him a small degree of privacy.
It was only a small degree, however, as the ship’s automated computer kept pinging him with alerts and alarms, as each of the main ship systems were brought back on line.
“Hydroponics Laboratory stable. Current produce: 12%...” the computer told him.
Just great, the man groaned. They would have to stop somewhere to restock their food stores, now that the Dalida no longer had its own. “I know that they meant well…” Hank murmured to nothing but his own ghostly reflection in the crystal glass viewscreen, overlaid with the outer stars.
He was talking about the Professor and Cortez, of course. They were each brilliant, in their own mad genius kind of way–but they didn’t think strategically. When they had acted to divert all but the thinnest amount of the ship’s power to Ida, they hadn’t realized that they would also be jeopardizing their future mission.
“Or we might be able to surmise that they were willing to sacrifice their food, their resources, and their lives for the safety of their crew, boss?” he heard the dulcet tones of Ida say from behind him. He spun about on his heel, half expecting to see her blue and grey hard light presentation standing there, but there was no such luck. He was instead staring at the blinking ‘I’ of her insignia on the opposite console screen.
“No sins of the flesh, Ida?” Hank said wearily. His body still ached, and even though he had loaded himself up with gene-therapeutic injectors and pain-killers, he still wasn’t sure that they were doing any good.
“Not at the moment, flyboy,” the voice of his personal A.I. teased him. She sounded normal once again, and Hank wondered if it was because she no longer had the entire planetary power of the Apollon from which to draw upon.
“They’re installing the Ubix Crystal as we speak, and the Professor was very clear about needing all of the available Dalida processing power to manage it. And put the ship back together, that is,” Ida explained.
“Oh,” Hank said, nodding his head although he wasn’t really listening. A part of him was glad in a way that Ida wouldn’t be walking around in the flesh–or hardened molecular field, as it were–any time soon. She had been devastating. And terrifying.
But I guess that it’s good to know that she can take that form when we need her, he had to agree.
On the Captain’s table was a half-bottle of triple-distilled Scotch that had been half empty when Hank had come on board and remained half empty still. Hank guessed that it had been left here as a toast by whichever team of Union engineers had finished the Dalida. He still hadn’t even had the time to take a swig yet, they had been running and fighting for so long.
Hank’s hand reached for the neck of the bottle and twisted the silvered glass container so that its amber contents sloshed back and forth against its insides.
“Want to see?” Ida interrupted the man’s thoughts.
“Huh? Oh. The crystal,” Hank looked up. He was preoccupied. And it was more than just the lure of the drink in front of him.
On the console screen that Ida had been occupying, the image changed to a scene deep in the heart of the generation ship itself. Hank saw a tube of a tunnel with silver walls and a mesh gantry on the floor. It was bright with brilliant rings of lights every few meters or so,
“Careful, careful…” he heard, and then saw the form of Cortez slowly shuffling down the tunnel in a special aluminum-silver encounter suit, one of the old-style ones with the large bubble helmets over his head. He was pulling on one end of a hover-cart, while Professor Serrano held onto the far end. In the central tray of the cart was the large butterfly-helix of the Ubix Crystal.
“Is it that dangerous?” Hank said. “I carried the thing in my bare hands!”
“One static spark in the reactor environment could create a localized supernova,” Ida said cheerily. “The Dalida will burn like a star, visible for a couple hundred thousand light years in every direction.”
Hank rubbed the palms of his hands together a little superstitiously. “You could have told me the cryst
al was that volatile…”
“Nothing that a bit of gene-therapy won’t fix. And lots of green leafy vegetables, boss,” Ida said. Hank was certain that she was making fun of him.
He watched as the two men slowly moved to the end of the tunnel, where there was a small white sphere of a room, with every face of the sphere incised into perfect geometric shapes. Hank remembered that it had something to do with radiation and graviton waves, but that was about as far as he had got. In the very center of the small sphere, hanging a few inches above its own pedestal and installed in its forcefield was the Dalida’s original crystal matrix.
The original was a far simpler design of two inter-locking circles. It was once again made of the same fractals of crystal, laced with golden arteries as the Ubix crystal was, but it was smaller, and was clearly less complicated.
“We’re sure this is going to work?” Hank asked Ida.
“Every test supports it. The Dalida was built to house the Ubix, after all,” Ida said.
Hank nodded, looked at the careful operation ahead of him, and then back at the half-empty bottle of Scotch. “Cut the feed,” Hank said wearily. “I don’t want to know if they get it wrong and we all get turned into stardust.”
“Arguable, you wouldn’t know anyway, boss…” Ida said. “Nuclear fission happens in less time than the human neurons can cognate—”
“Whatever,” Hank waved his hand, and Ida stopped the live transmission. He had other things on his mind. Other things that were even more important to the ex-Marine Captain than the Ubix crystal.
Hank picked up the half-empty Scotch bottle. There was a time when he would have unscrewed the cap and glugged it straight from the neck, and not thought twice about it. Now, however, he just held the amber-gold liquid up to the light and, very slowly set the bottle back into the drawer where he had found it.
“I’m nothing like you,” Hank whispered to somebody inside his head.
“I’m sorry, boss?” Ida asked. She even managed to sound concerned.
“Never mind, Ida. Keep doing what you’re doing. Help out the boys with the crystal. There’s something I’ve got to do.” Hank said, turning abruptly and marching out of his Ready Room.
“Captain,” Lory Cox greeted him as soon as his elevator hissed open on the floor that contained the Dalida’s Brig.
“You look better, Commander Cox,” Hank nodded at her. He used her title aboard the Dalida pointedly. Purposefully. I have to do this properly, he reminded himself. And besides which, she did look better. She had clearly washed, ate, and found one of the new service suits of which the generation ship appeared to have an endless supply. And, she must have taken advantage of the ship’s medical lounge, now that it was operational again.
“Thank you, Captain,” Lory said. She looked quizzically at the man for a second. “I’m afraid that you still look like crap sir. Didn’t you get any sleep?”
They had rotated into shift patterns as soon as the last bodies of the Jackal’s Wolverines had been thrown out of the nearest airlock, and their blood sanitized from the Bridge floor, walls, and occasionally ceiling. Even though Hank knew that the Elites would be coming for them now, he had made sure that the Dalida, with what power she had left, jumped to a not-so-far, completely-random patch of barren space.
Just for a few hours while we change over the crystal and work out where we’re going, Hank had ordered. But the real reason had been to allow his crew to rest, recuperate–and to feel like the crew of a ship again.
“Nah,” Hank shook his head. “Haven’t you ever heard? A good Captain never sleeps,” he gave a wry smile. First in, Last out, he thought to himself. In reality, he knew that he couldn’t sleep before he knew that his crew was alright.
“Okay,” Lory looked at Hank oddly. “You’re lying,” she searched his eyes. “To yourself, I mean. I can tell.”
Hank opened and closed his mouth but shook his head and continued to march down the corridor. Maybe he was lying. Maybe the truth was that the knowledge that the Jackal was here, on board his vessel wouldn’t give him a moment’s rest.
And I need to prove something to myself, Hank thought as they reached the bulkhead door of the cells.
“Open,” he growled, and stalked in.
“Cap’–you’re not about to do anything silly, are you?” Lory asked.
“Define silly,” Hank muttered as he set eyes on his target.
The Dalida’s Brig was split into a selection of large containment rooms and smaller iso-chambers. Steed and Madigan, in their infinite charity, had left the Jackal in one of the isolation ones.
The man was lying on the narrow cot bunkbed where there was barely enough room for his shoulders to span the metal. The cell extended just a couple of meters past the edge of the bed in all directions, enough room for the Jackal to stand up and turn around, and that was about it. A glittering blue forcefield spanned the front of the cell, and a wall panel could be opened for other more human concerns.
“Snider,” the Jackal opened his eyes. Their tormentor’s voice sounded scratchy and full of static, as Lory had let the Dalida’s medical bots only perform the most basic of operations to save the man’s prosthetic throat.
“Have you come to execute me now?” the Jackal didn’t move from the cot bed. He looked, if anything, nonchalant. “You know the old saying: Live by the sword, Die by the sword…”
Hank said nothing as he took a step towards the cell and regarded the man under his power. He thought of all of the ways that the Jackal had hurt him. Hank thought of all of the strange implements that the Union Doctor Vaas had used on him whilst he had been a prisoner on board the Pequod.
“No, I don’t believe that you have, have you?” the Jackal said in as close to an amused voice that he could manage. He pushed himself up from the bed and regarded the Captain with humorous, glittering eyes.
“Perhaps I was right about you all along. Perhaps you simply don’t have what it takes to do what needs to be done in this life,” the Jackal said.
Hank’s jaw tightened.
“Captain…” Lory, a few steps behind him said warningly. Hank didn’t need to turn around to see the fear or indecision in her face–he could hear her suspicions plainly in her voice: Was her Captain about to kill the hostage?
“I know what you’re trying to do, Jackal,” Hank growled at the man. He wondered if he had managed to have that Scotch–if he had downed the bottle or had decided to get pumped up on battle stims whether he would be quite so reserved.
“Do you know? Please tell me then, oh great Captain…” the Jackal gave a bark of electronic static from his shattered larynx. It was the closest the man could come to a laugh, Hank thought.
“You’re trying to make me kill you,” Hank said. “You think that way, you’ll win.”
The Jackal scowled back, licked his lips. “Actually, I was thinking about what I told you back on the Pequod,” the Jackal managed to hiss. “That there are those who give orders, and those who take them. You, Mr. Snider, are one of the latter.”
“How on earth do you figure that?” Hank scoffed. “You are currently sitting in an isolation cube on board my ship–a ship that I stole right out from under your nose and have since used to steal two of the most powerful secrets in all of the Union!” Hank said. He felt a little proud at that. The entire might of the Elites pitted against him. And he had managed to win.
“You are still following rules, Snider,” the Jackal said, and this time as he did so he pushed himself up from the edge of the bed and took slow, predatory steps to the edge of the glittering blue forcefield. It crackled inches from the man’s face.
“I’m a Captain, no one gives me orders,” Hank pointed out.
“Ha!” the Jackal coughed. “You are still taking orders, Snider. You are still a slave–only it is to the ghosts of your conscience. You believe that if you can prove yourself worthy to those around you, if you can keep your crew alive then perhaps you will be able to cleanse the sins of the pa
st, am I not right?”
Hank blinked. He hadn’t thought about it like that, but now that he did–it made an awful lot of sense. And I do have many crimes in my past, he admitted to himself. Marines under his command who had died, or orders that he had given that resulted in civilian deaths.
And every one of those crimes had been committed in the name of the Union, he thought.
“Your shame is your Master and Commander,” the Jackal whispered. “It is holding you back, Captain Snider.”
Hank looked into the fierce, cold eyes of the Jackal. Here was a man who would do anything for himself. Who would probably betray the Elites and the Union if he thought that it would bring him what he wanted…? Maybe the Jackal is as much trapped by his own greed and need for destruction as I am by my conscience, the Captain quizzed himself.
