Captain Future xx - The Death of Captain Future (October 1995)

by Allen Steele

  On the other hand, when you're hungry for work, you'll put up with just about anything.

  Schumacher read the expression on my face. “It's not just that,” he said hastily. “I understand the first officer is okay.” For a google, that is, although he didn't say it aloud. “It's McKinnon himself. People have jumped ship, faked illness, torn up their union cards ... anything to get off the Comet.”

  “That bad?”

  “That bad.” He took a long hit off the flask, gasped, and passed it back across the desk to me. “Oh, the pay's okay ... minimum wage, but by Association standards that's better than union scale ... and the Comet passes all the safety requirements, or at least so at inspection time. But McKinnon's running a tank short of a full load, if y'know what I mean.”

  I didn't drink from the flask. “Naw, man, I don't know what you mean. What's with this ... what did you call him?”

  “Captain Future. That's what he calls himself, Christ knows why.” He grinned. “Not only that, but he also calls his AI ‘The Brain'...”

  I laughed out loud. “The Brain? Like, what? He's got a brain floating in a jar? I don't get it...”

  “I dunno. It's a fetish of some kind.” He shook his head. “Anyway, everyone who's worked for him says that he thinks he's some kinda space hero, and he expects everyone to go along with the idea. And he's supposed to be real tough on people ... you might think he was a perfectionist, if he wasn't such a slob himself.”

  I had worked for both kinds before, along with a few weirdos. They didn't bother me, so long as the money was right and they minded their own business. “Ever met him?”

  Schumacher held out his hand; I passed the flask back to him and he took another swig. Must be the life, sitting on your ass all day, getting drunk and deciding people's futures. I envied him so much, I hoped someone would kindly cut my throat if I was ever in his position.

  “Nope,” he said. “Not once. He spends all his time on the Comet, even when he's back here. Hardly ever leaves the ship, from what I've been told ... and that's another thing. Guys who've worked for him say that he expects his crew to do everything but wipe his butt after he visits the head. Nobody gets a break on his ship, except maybe his first officer.”

  “What about him?”

  “Her. Nice girl, name of...” He thought hard for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “Jeri. Jeri Lee-Bose, that's it.” He smiled. “I met her once, not long before she went to work on the Comet. She's sweet, for a google.”

  He winked and dropped his voice a bit. “I hear she's got a thing for us apes,” he murmured. “In fact, I've been told she's bunking with her captain. If half of what I've heard about McKinnon is true, that must make him twice as sick as I've heard.”

  I didn't reply. Schumacher dropped his feet and leaned across the desk, lacing his fingers together as he looked straight at me. “Look, Rohr,” he said, as deadly serious as if he was discussing my wanting to marry his sister, “I know you're working under a time limit and how much the Jove Commerce job means to you. But I gotta tell you, the only reason why Captain Future would even consider taking aboard a short-timer is because nobody else will work for him. He's just as desperate as you are, but I don't give a shit about him. If you wanna turn it down, I won't add it to your card and I'll save your place in line. It'll just be between you and me. Okay?”

  “And if I turn it down?”

  He wavered his hand back and forth. “Like I said, I can try to find you another gig. The Nickel Queen's due home in another six weeks or so. I've got some pull with her captain, so maybe I can get you a job there ... but honest to Jesus, I can't promise anything. The Queen's a good ship and everyone I know wants to work for her, just as much as nobody wants to get within a klick of the Comet.”

  “So what do you suggest I do?”

  Schumacher just smiled and said nothing. As my union rep, he was legally forbidden against making any decisions for me; as a pal, he had done his best to warn me about the risks. From both points of view, though, he knew I didn't have any real choice. I could spend three months aboard a ship run by a borderline psycho, or the rest of my life jacking off on the Moon.

  I thought about it for a few moments, then I asked for the contract.

  * * * *

  The three Futuremen who were Curt Newton's faithful, lifelong comrades made a striking contrast to their tall, red-haired young leader.

  —Hamilton; The Comet Kings (1942)

  One-sixth gravity disappeared as I crawled through the carousel hatch and entered the bridge.

  The Comet's command center was located in the non-rotating forward deck of the crew module. The bridge was the largest single compartment in the ship, but even in freefall it was cramped: chairs, consoles, screens, emergency suit lockers, the central navigation table with its holo tank and, at the center of the low ceiling, the hemispherical bulge of the observation blister.

  The ceiling lamps were turned down low when I came in—The Brain was mimicking Earth-time night—but I could see Jeri seated at her duty station on the far end of the circular deck. She looked around when she heard the hatch open.

  “Morning,” she said, smiling at me. “Hey, is that coffee?”

  “Something like it,” I muttered. She gazed enviously at the squeezebulb in my hand. “Sorry I didn't bring you any,” I added, “but the Captain...”

  “Right. I heard Bo yell at you.” She feigned a pout which didn't last very long. “That's okay. I can get some later after we make the burn.”

  Jeri Lee-Bose: six-foot-two, which is short for a Superior, with the oversized dark blue eyes that give bioengineered spacers their unsavory nickname. Thin and flat-chested to the point of emaciation, the fingers of her ambidextrous hands were long and slender, her thumbs almost extending to the tips of her index fingers. Her ash-blond hair was shaved nearly to the skull, except for the long braid that extended from the nape of her neck nearly down to the base of her narrow spine, where her double-jointed legs began.

  The pale skin of her face was marked with finely-etched tattoos around her eyes, nose, and mouth, forming the wings of a monarch butterfly. She had been given these when she had turned five, and since Superiors customarily add another tattoo on their birthdays and Jeri Lee was twenty-five, pictograms covered most of her arms and her shoulders, constellations and dragons which weaved their way under and around the tank-top she wore. I had no idea of what else lay beneath her clothes, but I imagined that she was well on her way to becoming a living painting.

  Jeri was strange, even for a Superior. For one thing, her kind usually segregate themselves from Primaries, as they politely call us baseline humans (or apes, when we're not around). They tend to remain within their family-based clans, operating independent satraps which deal with the TBSA and the major space companies only out of economic necessity, so it's rare to find a lone Superior working on a vessel owned by a Primary.

  For another thing, although I've been around Superiors most of my life and they don't give me the creeps like they do most groundhogs and even many spacers, I've never appreciated the aloof condescension the majority of them display around unenhanced humans. Give one of them a few minutes, and they'll bend your ear about the Superior philosophy of extropic evolution and all that jive. Yet Jeri was the refreshing, and even oddball, exception to the rule. She had a sweet disposition, and from the moment I had come aboard the Comet, she had accepted me both as an equal and as a new-found friend. No stuffiness, no harangues about celibacy or the unspirituality of eating meat or using profanity; she was a fellow crewmate, and that was that.

  No. That wasn't quite all there was to it.

  When one got past the fact that she was a scarecrow with feet that functioned as a second pair of hands and eyes the size of fuel valves, she was sensual as hell. She was a pretty woman, and I had become infatuated with her. Schumacher would have twitched at the thought of sleeping with a google, but in the three weeks since The Brain had revived us from the zombie tanks, there had
been more than a few times when my desire to see the rest of her body exceeded simple curiosity about the rest of her tattoos.

  Yet I knew very little about her. As much as I loved looking at her, that was surpassed by my admiration for her innate talent as a spacer. In terms of professional skill, Jeri Lee-Bose was one of the best First Officers I had ever met. Any Royal Navy, TBSA, or free-trader captain would have killed to sign her aboard.

  So what the hell was she doing aboard a scow like the Comet, serving under a bozo like Bo McKinnon?

  I tucked in my knees and did a half-gainer which landed the soles of my stikshoes against the carpet. Feet now firmly planted on the floor, I walked across the circular compartment to the nav table, sucking on the squeezebulb in my left hand. “Where's the captain?” I asked.

  “Topside, taking a sextant reading.” She nodded toward the observation blister above us. “He'll be down in a minute.”

  Typical. Part of the reason why Superiors have enhanced eyes is for optical work like sextant sightings. This should be Jeri's job, but McKinnon seemed to regard the blister as his personal throne. I sighed as I settled down in my chair and buckled in. “Should have known,” I muttered. “Wakes you up in the middle of the goddamn night, then disappears when you want a straight answer.”

  Her mouth pursed into a sympathetic frown. “Bo will tell you more when he comes down,” she said, then she swiveled around in her chair as she returned her attention to her board.

  Jeri Lee was the only person aboard who was permitted to call Captain Future by his real name. I didn't have that privilege, and The Brain hadn't been programmed to do otherwise. The fondness I had developed for Jeri over the last three weeks was tempered by the fact that, in almost any disagreement, she usually sided with the captain.

  Obviously, there was something else she knew but wasn't telling me, preferring to defer the issue to McKinnon. I had become used to such behavior over the last few weeks, but it was still irritating. Most first officers act as intermediaries between captain and crew, and in that sense Jeri performed well, yet at times like this I felt as if I had more in common with The Brain than with her.

  So be it. I swiveled my chair to face the nav table. “Hey, Brain,” I called out. “Gimme a holo of our current position and trajectory, please.”

  The space within the holo tank coruscated briefly, then an arch-shaped slice of the main belt appeared above the table. Tiny spots of orange light depicting major asteroids slowly moved along blue sidereal tracks, each designated by their catalog numbers. The Comet was pinpointed by a small silver replica of the vessel, leading the end of a broken red line which bisected the asteroid orbits.

  The Comet was near the edge of the third Kirkwood gap, one of the “empty spaces” in the belt where Martian and Jovian gravitational forces caused the number of identified asteroids to diminish per fraction of an astronomical unit. We were now in the 1/3 gap, about two and a half A.U.'s from the Sun. In another couple of days we would enter the main belt and be closing in on Ceres. Once we arrived, the Comet would unload the cargo it had carried from the Moon and, in return, take on the raw ore TBSA prospectors had mined from the belt and shipped to Ceres Station. It was also there that I was scheduled to depart the Comet and await the arrival of the Jove Commerce.

  At least, that was the itinerary. Now, as I studied the holo, I noticed a not-so-subtle change. The red line depicting the freighter's trajectory had been altered since the end of my last watch about four hours earlier.

  It no longer intercepted Ceres. In fact, it didn't even come close to the asteroid's orbit.

  The Comet had changed course while I slept.

  Without saying anything to Jeri, I unbuckled my harness and pushed over to table, where I silently stared at the holo for a couple of minutes, using the keypad to manually focus and enlarge the image. Our new bearing took us almost a quarter of a million kilometers from Ceres, on just the other side of the 1/3 Kirkwood gap.

  “Brain,” I said, “what's our destination?”

  "The asteroid 2046-Barr," it replied. It displayed a new orange spot in the tank, directly in front of the Comet's red line.

  The last of my drowsiness gradually dissipated into a pulse of white-hot rage. I could feel Jeri's eyes on my back.

  “Rohr...” she began.

  I didn't care. I stabbed the intercom button on the table. “McKinnon!” I bellowed. “Get down here!”

  Long silence. I knew he could hear me.

  “Goddammit, get down here! Now!”

  Motors whined in the ceiling above me, then the hatch below the observation blister irised open and a wingback chair began to descend into the bridge, carrying the commanding officer of the TBSA Comet. It wasn't until the chair reached the deck that the figure seated in it spoke.

  “You can call me ... Captain Future.”

  In the ancient pulp magazines he so adored, Captain Future was six-and-a-half feet in height, ruggedly handsome, bronze-skinned and red-haired. None of this applied to Bo McKinnon. Squat and obese, he filled the chair like a half-ton of lard. Black curly hair, turning grey at the temples and filthy with dandruff, receded from his forehead and fell around his shoulders, while an oily, unkempt beard dripped down the sides of his fat cheeks, themselves the color of mildewed wax. There were old food stains on the front of his worn-out sweatshirt and dark marks in the crotch of his trousers where he had failed to properly shake himself after the last time he had visited the head. And he smelled like a fart.

  If my description seems uncharitable, let there be no mistake: Bo McKinnon was a butt-ugly, foul-looking son of a whore, and I have met plenty of slobs like him to judge by comparison. He had little respect for personal hygiene and fewer social graces, he had no business being anyone's role model, and I was no mood for his melodramatic bullshit just now.

  “You changed course.” I pointed at the holo tank behind me, my voice quavering in anger. “We're supposed to come out of the Kirkwood in another few hours, and while I was asleep you changed course.”

  McKinnon calmly stared back at me. “Yes, Mister Furland, that I did. I changed the Comet's trajectory while you were in your quarters.”

  “We're no longer heading for Ceres ... Christ, we're going to come nowhere near Ceres!”

  He made no move to rise from his throne. “That's correct,” he said, slowly nodding his head. “I ordered The Brain to alter our course so that we'd intercept 2046-Barr. We fired maneuvering thrusters at 0130 shiptime, and in two hours we'll execute another course correction. That should put us within range of the asteroid in about...”

  “Eight hours, Captain,” Jeri said.

  “Thank you, Miss Bose,” he said, otherwise barely acknowledging her. “Eight hours. At this time the Comet will be secured for emergency action.”

  He folded his hands across his vast stomach and gazed back at me querulously. “Any further questions, Mister Furland?”

  Further questions?

  My mouth hung agape for a few moments. I was unable to speak, unable to protest, unable to do anything except wonder at the unmitigated gall of this mutant amalgamation of human and frog genes.

  “Just one,” I finally managed to say. “How do you expect me to make my rendezvous with the Jove Commerce if we detour to...”

  “2046-Barr,” Jeri said softly.

  McKinnon didn't so much as blink. “We won't,” he said. “In fact, I've already sent a message to Ceres Station, stating that the Comet will be delayed and that our new ETA is indefinite. With any luck, we'll reach Ceres in about forty-eight hours. You should be able to...”

  “No, I won't.” I grasped the armrest of his chair with both hands and leaned forward until my face was only a few inches from his. “The Jove is due to leave Ceres in forty-two hours ... and that's at the latest, if it's going to meet its launch window for Callisto. They'll go, with or without me, and if they go without me, I'm stuck on Ceres.”

  No. That wasn't entirely true. Ceres Station wasn't like the Moon;
it was too small an outpost to allow a shipwrecked spacer to simply hang around until the next outer-system vessel passed through. The TBSA rep on Ceres would demand that I find a new gig, even if it entailed signing aboard a prospector as grunt labor. This was little better than indentured servitude, since my union card didn't mean shit out here in terms of room, board, and guaranteed oxygen supplies; my paychecks would be swallowed up by all the above. Even then, there was no guarantee that I'd swing another job aboard the next Jupiter or Saturn tanker; I was lucky enough to get the Jove Commerce job.

  That, or I could tuck tail and go back the way I came—and that meant remaining aboard the Comet for its return flight to the Moon.

  In the latter case, I'd sooner try to walk home.

  Try to understand. For the past three weeks, beginning with the moment I had crawled out of the zombie tank, I had been forced to endure almost every indignity possible while serving under Bo McKinnon. His first order, in fact, had been in the hibernation deck, when he had told me to take the catheter off his prick and hold a bag for him to pee in.

  That had been only the beginning. Standing double-watches on the bridge because he was too lazy to get out of bed. Repairing decrepit equipment that should have been replaced years ago, only to have it break down again within a few more days after he had abused it past its tolerance levels. Being issued spurious orders on a whim, only to have those same orders countermanded before the task was half-complete because McKinnon had more scut-work he wanted me to do—then being berated because the first assignment had been left unfinished. Meals skipped because the captain decided that now was the time for me go EVA and inspect the davits in the payload bay. Rest periods interrupted because he wanted a snack fetched from the galley and was too “busy” to get it himself...

  But most of all, the sibilant, high-pitched whine of his voice, like that of a spoiled brat who had been given too many toys by an overindulgent parent. Which was, indeed, exactly what he was.