by D. Brumbley
Logan was having none of it, though. He hooked his feet around one bolted chair leg and shuffled the imposter around until Logan could grab one flailing leg and slam the man hard against the floor of the compartment. In the disorientation that followed, he launched himself at the man’s back and managed to pin both his arms, with his legs locked around the man’s waist. “Calm down, pal.” Logan said as the man attempted to struggle in vain with still more head butts that Logan easily dodged. “You’re gonna go to sleep for the rest of the trip. We’ll talk more when you wake up. Just get comfy. Doc’s got something for ya.” He had to twist himself as they flailed together in the air due to the man’s struggles, but there were a few individuals nearby who had presence of mind enough to take Logan by the back of his shirt to stabilize him in such a way that Mercury could approach without getting bitten or kicked.
Mercury acted fast and had a lot more practice with orienting herself quickly and correctly, so she was at Logan’s side almost too soon. She had the sedative ready and even though the man was wiggling, she managed to get the needle securely into his arm, but somehow afterward, he was able to get the arm free, and he elbowed her hard in the cheek. Mercury could already feel the bruise that would show up on her pale skin, but she managed to catch herself on someone’s seat before his blow to her face actually pushed her further away.
Logan wrenched the man after he threw the elbow, slamming his flailing leg into a nearby seat with an audible crack that had the man roaring in pain rather than defiance. But even as he wailed, he began to settle down and go limp, and within a few moments, his groans of pain gave way to grunts as he tried to stay conscious and failed. Once it was clear the man was out cold, Logan released him to float in the open space between the passenger rows and went to tend to Mercury. “Let me see it.” He reached up to turn her face toward him, looking over her cheek and the side of her face with a touch that was every bit as tender as his hold on the imposter had been rough. “Nothing broken?”
She reached up and touched her cheek with a wince, but ran her tongue along her teeth inside of her mouth to make sure that there was no damage. Mercury shook her head slowly with his hand still touching her skin gently. It was strange that he could be a hulking fighter one moment and gentle the next, but she had seen the same with Orion. Men were such strange creatures sometimes. “Nothing feels broken. Though it hurts a lot. Does it look bruised already?”
“It’ll ring for a while, and yeah, it looks like it’s gonna bruise something awful, but it should be gone in a day or two, if you heal up here the way we do down below.” He held onto her face for another moment just to finish looking over her cheek, then let it go. “Sorry about that. He’s not that strong, but he’s a slippery bastard.”
“It’s alright.” Mercury said as she tried to smile, though she winced again. “It’ll make me look tougher than I really am.” She looked over at the now-unconscious man and then she sighed heavily. “I’m going to go put ice on this. Can you update Orion?”
“Sure, just as soon as I get this guy tied up.” He had to use Mercury to push back a little bit just to get himself in motion back toward the man’s body, leveraging with a hand at her waist to push himself toward the deck and push Mercury gently back against the seat where she had ended up. “Nothing to see here, folks, everybody go back to gazing at the stars. Just taking out the trash.” Logan grabbed the man by the back of his flight suit and began carefully floating with him through the air toward the cockpit, towing the man’s body with one hand. An hour in space and he’d already had to beat someone unconscious. That didn’t bode well for the rest of his time in the Initiative.
22
After Logan had subdued the passenger masquerading as Jeffrey Wurtz, the mood on the ship turned pointedly sedated, as if Mercury’s syringe had been intended for everyone, not just the fraud. Everyone else on board had checked out, their identities secured and verified, and there was plenty of sedative to keep the imposter unconscious for the rest of the trip to rendezvous with Nine.
Orion looked over his shoulder at Anna, who was still looking through the various controls for the ship after she had promised not to blow them up by touching anything she shouldn’t. Fitch had long since decided to sit back with a book just to forget everything that had happened prior to launch, which left him watching the instruments and Anna playing with the machine.
“If you’re wondering, the answer’s yes.” He eventually said as he leaned back to stretch in mid-air, nearly breaking himself in half as he arched his back in zero gravity. “Yes, it’s always this level of boring. Ninety percent of the time, anyway. Maybe ninety-five.”
“It’s not boring.” Anna said as she continued to explore, since she was having a good time, even if the situation was somewhat dire. “And if you’re really that bored, then come over here and teach me some more about this shuttle. That’s got to be more exciting than just floating there watching screens, right?”
“You really are the cat that curiosity’s gonna kill.” He laughed and twisted slowly in the air to grab onto the wall of the cockpit and move himself toward her. “We should be about half an hour out, so that’s how much education you get. What are you looking at?”
She glared at him for his comment about her curiosity, but he wasn’t the first one to say that her curiosity would get her into trouble. On the other hand, most of the men in her life hadn’t been complaining that much when they realized all the experience her curiosity gave her. “Well, when I look at this screen, I think I’m looking at the other stations nearby, right? Smaller stations. Even though they’re not that close, I realize. But what are these others? Satellites? And how do you orient yourself up here? I mean, North, South, East, West, they all still apply, I guess, but…everywhere you look there’s nothing. It’s not like going off of the sun, or land masses, or the river…Technology is great, sure, but what if things go to shit? Surely you can pilot this thing without a computer telling you what to do, right?”
“Yeah…” he affirmed, but he sounded doubtful about it. “It’s not so much about piloting things up here. If you think of it like that, you’ll run out of fuel in a hurry and wind up stranded somewhere. You’ve gotta think of it in terms of inertia, trajectories, and all the shit that’s potentially in your way. It’s all the other shit in the sky that ends up being a problem. So yeah, you could fly without instrumentation, but it’s the computer that keeps an eye out for the stray…I don’t know, there were some fuckwads a few years ago who got their hands on a big box of golf balls and were hitting them out of the airlock of their station for kicks, joking about who could hit the moon with them. Turns out, about two hundred of them managed to stay in solid orbit and four people died because of station impacts that couldn’t be avoided. So, it’s shit like that most likely to kill you up here.” He oriented himself so that he was behind her as she looked over the panels, just because he was accustomed to being so much larger than everybody else around him that reaching over people’s shoulders wasn’t a problem. He reached past her and pointed to the right commands for her to get data on the other, smaller objects that she had correctly pointed out. “This is a running Little-Shit catalog of everything within three hundred kilometers or estimated to be within three hundred clicks in the next hour. That’s why it’s changing like that.” He left the list up and moved so that he could look down at her, even if he was still in a position to walk her through the screens with other questions. “You fly down on the ground? I thought I would’ve remembered seeing another pilot in the registry for this pickup.”
“Legally?” She said with a laugh as she tilted her head back and to the side to try and look back at him, though it wasn’t working very well despite how much taller he was. “I’m not a pilot, just like I’m not a lot of things. You know, by title or profession. But I like to learn and I like to deal with machines. It could be my small-er-person complex.” She laughed again and then turned her attention back to the screen. “I don’t know, when peopl
e tell you your whole life that there isn’t a lot of time to learn much of anything, sometimes it makes you want to learn everything.”
That was clearly heavier than Orion had thought she was going to go with the conversation, but he just nodded his agreement. “Well, if you’re good with machines, then you’re gonna be good with everything up here. As far as I know, they’ve got some of you set for certain positions in the Initiative, but most of you are gonna be under an open skill set until you decide what you’re into. You want to be a pilot, you could certainly take a run for it.”
“Really? You think that they would actually give me a shot at that?” She was surprised that he thought she could be a pilot. “That would be fun. Think you would be my teacher?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. There’s maybe thirty of us in the Initiative, against almost three thousand people, mostly from Earth, so I expect we’ll be training a few more of you to help us out.” He reached out and smacked her hand when she was about to hit something that wasn’t what he knew she was looking for, and he indicated the right one before he let her continue. “I’ve trained before. If you manage to actually ask a decent question about the controls instead of just dicking around for twenty minutes trying to find your way back to the central prompts screen, then you’ll be easy.”
“I don’t know, I like dicking around.” She replied with a wry grin, even after he smacked her hand. “You’re a little bit pushy. Lucky for you, I’m not ladylike enough to get too offended by your behavior.” Anna was always absurdly sarcastic, and she tried to be as humorous as possible, though it wasn’t always easy. It was part of the reason why Ben acted the part of the oldest sibling, he was always more serious about everything than she was.
“You think I’m pushy, just wait and see if they give you a real instructor. If you’re not questioning your own existence within the first week, they don’t feel like they’re doing their job.” He showed her a few more screens where she could track the progress of inbound objects and watch for current mapped trajectories of just about everything in the sky, but there was an alert in the middle of one of his commands, letting them know it was time to start prepping for final approach to the station. “Alright, this is the fun part. Watch and learn.” Orion gave her a final smile and contorted himself through the air back into his own seat, though the ship lurched a little while he was away from everything and sent him against the front view-window. He just rubbed the back of his head and glared at Fitch. “You know, someday that’s gonna get old. For both of us.”
“Nah.” Kameron said with a grin and a satisfied chuckle over at Orion before she looked back at Anna and then back at Orion. “It was twofold anyway. I get a better view of her when the restraints have to do their job.”
Orion just rolled his eyes as he got himself back into his seat and back into his restraints. “You’re hopeless. You realize that in about…an hour and a half, you’re about to get matched with somebody possessed of a penis, right?”
Kameron definitely did not look happy about that, her wince was obvious but her gag at the idea was well-contained. “I hope he expects to get cheated on, because dicks are disgusting.” She looked him up and down once and then shook her head. “I can’t be the only woman that definitely does not want to get involved with a penis, and I’m going to find however many of those women that I can. Somehow I’m going to have to tolerate it for reproductive purposes and I really don’t know how to make that happen.”
“Hey, we’re going to a new planet. We’re all about new experiences.” He grinned over at her, even though he sympathized with the problem. “Besides, like you said, you’re getting matched with him to reproduce, it’s not like you’re legally required to fall in love with the guy. Just set expectations right off the bat and you’ll be fine. Who knows, maybe you’ll get paired up with a gay guy who’s just as unhappy about it as you are. That way you can both get incredibly drunk, go at it, then move on with the rest of your lives afterward.”
Her expression still looked incredibly sour as she contemplated the idea and looked back at Anna longingly. “So not fair. Can’t they just inject me with some sperm and let me have a beautiful woman?”
“I can still hear you, you know. Especially when you turn your head and look at me.” Anna said as she peeled her eyes away from the screens. “I’m flattered, and I bet you’re a lot of fun, but I’m still married. And honestly, I actually do like penis much better than tits and a vagina. I’ve had a fair sampling. Penis wins.”
The whole exchange just had Orion laughing as he worked on the controls to adjust the pitch of the ship to bring them into rotation with Nine as they approached. “Alright, well, as much fun as it is to listen to how either disgusting or amazing my equipment is, it’s time to get back to work. Bickford, you think you can go back and help get people back in their seats? Docking gets bumpy sometimes, I don’t want people getting pancaked against the hull if I have to move fast and dodge somebody here in a minute. It’s sure to be a pretty busy dock right about now.”
“Doesn’t look that busy, actually.” Fitch said as she turned her attention back to her reports, though her expression didn’t look happy about it. “This news feed coming in says some of the ships didn’t get clearance to come back.” She gave Orion a sideways glance. “A couple were destroyed.”
He was worried when they found an imposter aboard that there was something larger going on, but he hadn’t wanted to admit it. He made a final few adjustments to make sure they were on course to match up with the station, then sighed and lowered his head without looking over at her. “How many? What pickup sites? Anyone from our unit?”
“Four ships didn’t get clearance to come back. Another was completely destroyed, fifty-five passengers killed. The other destroyed was just the ship, no one had boarded it yet, they’re sending another down to pick people up, but obviously they’ll be a few days late.” Fitch was starting to feel sick to her stomach as she read over the information several times as quickly as her eyes could read. “It looks like the ships were mostly in the Asia continent. One in Africa.” She shook her head quickly. “We can’t think about this right now. We need to get our passengers safely aboard Nine. We’ll get the full story once we’re inside.”
Anna was quiet as she listened to Kameron explain the severity of the situation, then unbuckled her restraints to go do as Orion had asked. “I’ll be back once I’ve made sure everyone is ready for docking.” She eventually said out loud, but she didn’t pause to hear a response as she slipped out of the control room and floated haphazardly out into the general seating area.
She immediately saw Logan near the doctor that she knew was Orion’s wife, and she made a beeline for him, since she needed to talk to him. Fortunately for her, his reflexes were like a cat. She’d pushed toward him too hard and nearly crashed into the wall next to him before he reached out and grabbed her. “Hey, you. Nice save. My skull thanks you.”
“Your skull is welcome, along with the rest of you.” He pulled her through the air to set her down on the seat next to him so she could get her bearings, but didn’t take his hands off her afterward. “How much longer till Nine? People are starting to get antsy back here.”
“We’re nearly there. I’m here to tell everyone to get back into their seats so they don’t become splatter on the walls.” She buried her face into the side of his arm, though, as soon as she was sitting next to him. “Logan.” She said softly, and when he leaned down to get closer to her face, she kissed him first and then spoke in a whisper in his ear afterward. “Two shuttles were destroyed, one with fifty-five people on it. Four others weren’t even cleared to leave. This shit is bad. What are we doing here?”
That was clearly a lot worse than he had imagined it was going to be, and it took him a moment to take in that kind of information before he just sighed and kissed the top of her head as she rested her face against his arm. “Trying to make a difference.” His voice was low as well, and he didn’t sound as thoroughly co
nvinced as he had a few hours earlier when they had been trying to talk themselves into getting out of the truck. “Any claim of who did it? Angry people who didn’t get accepted? Terrorists? Religious freaks?”
“I don’t know, the other pilot didn’t say if her information specified. That’s…a very well-planned attack, Logan. I mean, six different launch sites compromised, seven, if you include ours? At least our shuttle wasn’t blown up.” She held tighter to him afterward. “This is terrifying. Who knows what the fuck could happen next?”
“Whoever’s doing the blowing up, I would guess.” He looked across the cargo bay to where he had secured ‘Jeffrey’ against a wall with half a dozen different cords after searching him and finding nothing but a fried communicator. “Maybe he’ll have some answers for us once we get to Nine and turn him over to the Director.”
“Maybe.” Anna replied as she looked over where Logan had secured the infiltrator. Eventually she looked into Logan’s eyes and pressed her lips against his in a desperate kiss. Her tongue traced along the seam of his lips in a velvet tease before she pulled away. Fear of death apparently made her want him even more. Logan kept her grounded, and reminding herself that they were in this together was keeping her sane. “I love you. I would be lost here without you with me.”
“I love you too.” He pulled her into his lap to kiss her once more, since he knew she had to go and get everyone else secured for docking and he wanted her as close as possible for as long as possible. “We’ll handle it. Whatever this is that’s going on up here, we’re in it now, and we’ll handle it. Whatever it takes.”
She nodded in agreement since it was all she could do and they had no other option. They weren’t going home, and now they might never get the chance, certainly if people were out to kill them for being associated with the Initiative. All they had was whatever was ahead of them with Jannah and Jannah itself, and they would have to figure it out somehow. Anna stole another burning kiss before she took a deep breath and slowly started to move out of his lap. “Stay secure, alright? I’ll see you after we dock.” Anna ran her fingers over the side of his face and then gave him a small smile before she pulled away completely.
