Space Above and Beyond - #3 Mutiny - Easton Royce

by Easton Royce

  Keats stepped over to one of the cargo containers, wiping away the fog on the porthole. "We're also carrying twelve containers... of unborn In-Vitros." Cooper made himself peer in at the glass cylinders filled with the submerged bodies.

  "Where are they going?"

  "A plutonium mining colony in the Corvis star system. They haven't got a chance." Keats grit his teeth. "What are a few Tanks, more or less, right?" Cooper looked at the suspended In-Vitros beyond I he door and felt a wave of disgust roll through him. "I can't believe they still ship In-Vitros this way. Do you know who they are?"

  Keats seemed to be waiting for this question. "Right now they're just numbers on a cargo manifest," he answered.

  Cooper turned back to the porthole, but his breathing had fogged the glass again. There was a law that said In-Vitros weren't just numbers. Every In-Vitro had a name and a record of his or her genetic batch. Most genes had been spliced so many times that there could be no genetic link to any living, breathing parents. But there was always the chance you would find others who shared your gene pool—brothers or sisters. It was a rare occurrence, but not unheard of.

  Somewhere on this ship, Cooper knew there had to be a list of their names. And he knew he was going to do whatever it took to find it.

  Chapter 3

  First Mate Nicholas Potter stood on the bridge with the rest of the human crew.

  He'd always felt this was his bridge. In spite of the fact that Captain Llewellyn gave the orders, it was Potter who passed those orders on to the crew. Nothing happened on this ship without him. And he let everyone know it.

  There was nothing soft about Nicholas Potter, and he liked it that way. A sailor had to be hard if he was to survive this life. So he was hard on his fellow human crewmen, and even harder on the Tanks. The captain seemed to have a soft place in his heart for those Tanks in the engine room. Not Potter. As far as he was concerned, every Tank that had a job meant that somewhere else there was a flesh-born human who didn't.

  "Set course for the Canis Majoris star system," Captain Llewellyn ordered as he stepped onto the bridge.

  Potter passed the order on to Navigator Harkin, a nothing of a man whom Potter could mold like putty.

  "Plot course setting at two-one-fiver," said the captain.

  Potter turned and glared at him. "You're taking us through Blood Alley?" he asked. "That nav channel's only two hundred clicks wide!"

  "These Marines need to rendezvous with their starcraft carrier," the captain explained.

  But Marine Corps priorities did not impress Potter. "Need I remind you, Captain, that's not an approved route for commercial freighters?"

  "Need I remind you," said the Captain simply, "that there's a war on? Plot course setting."

  Potter brushed his long dreadlocked hair out of his eyes and tried again. "That course takes us right between Adhara and Aludra. The hydrogen gases of the twin suns will play havoc with our radio communication. And the solar flares will mess up the on-board computers!"

  "And," Captain Llewellyn added, "it's the fastest way from Groombridge 34 to the Saratoga."

  Potter crossed his arms. "I don't recall hiring on for a suicide mission."

  Llewellyn turned to him, matching his glare with an icy one of his own. "When I give you an order, Mr. Potter, I expect you to follow it. Plot course setting. Now."

  Potter held Llewellyn's gaze. Fine, he thought. He imagined a time when he would be off Llewellyn's ship, giving his own orders. With any luck, it would be soon.

  "Plot a course heading two-one-fiver, Mr. Harkin," Potter spat out. Then he turned and walked off the bridge without so much as a look at Llewellyn.

  McQueen had stood at the threshold of the bridge and watched the exchange between the captain and his first mate.

  This is a lax crew, he thought. He much preferred the discipline of the military, where an order was an order, and there was no room for debate.

  "Hard to find men you can trust," said Llewellyn, reading the look on McQueen's face.

  But McQueen had something else on his mind—something he'd been wanting to talk to the captain about since they'd boarded the ship.

  "That's quite a cargo you're carrying," he started.

  Llewellyn looked away guiltily. "Professional miners. We ship them out to the mines, and we come back full of ore." He added, "Freighters like ours are the backbone of industry."

  But McQueen wasn't buying the captain's excuse. "My first five years out of the tank, I worked the uranium mines on Omicron Draconis. Thirty-four of us were shipped out. Six came back." He stared at Llewellyn. He didn't know what freighter had shipped him to the Omicron mines, but it very well could have been the MacArthur. With Captain Llewellyn at the helm.

  "I don't know if there's a hell," McQueen said slowly, "but if there is, I've already been there."

  Llewellyn held his gaze. "That was before the World Federation made that sort of thing illegal. All the In-Vitros on my crew signed on for their duty."

  "I'm not talking about them." McQueen kept his voice calm in spite of his anger. "You have a cargo of In-Vitro unborns. What did they sign on for?"

  Llewellyn seemed to shrink inside his captain's uniform. "I don't pack the cargo containers. I just haul them through space."

  But they both knew that answer wasn't good enough.

  Chapter 4

  The trans-solar navigational channel between the stars Adhara and Aludra was a furnace where ships had to fly blind. Every now and again a solar flare would lick out from one of the two stars, like a tentacle, and incinerate any ship in its path.

  That was how it had earned the name Blood Alley.

  It was a navigator's nightmare. And for the 58th, it was the only way back to the Saratoga.

  Bad as it was, Blood Alley was a walk through the park compared to what the 58th had already been through. For them, this trip was downtime. Time to read letters... and to write them.

  Janice loved your present, said the letter that Damphousse was reading. I took her to Detroit Disneyland for her birthday. She loved Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. But she missed you the whole time. And I missed you, too, Vanessa. Damphousse wasn't one for tears, but this letter from her boyfriend left her all misty-eyed. She couldn't remember the last time someone had called her by her first name.

  She noticed Nathan looking at her.

  "I haven't gotten a letter from my family in weeks," he said. "We've been moving around so much, it's amazing anything finds us on the Net." Damphousse held up the computer printout. "It's from my boyfriend," she explained. "I don't know how he found me, but it was waiting for me in the computer back on Groombridge 34."

  She handed Nathan the photo that had printed out along with the letter. The girl in the picture was six. The man with her looked about ten years older than Damphousse.

  "He's divorced," she explained. "Janice still misses her mother, but I doubt she really misses me." Damphousse shook her head. The girl had barely had time to get used to her before she was shipped out halfway across the galaxy.

  "In time, I'm sure she'll learn to love you," Nathan offered.

  But Damphousse wasn't so sure. "Love isn't learned, Nathan. It just is."

  Across the cabin, Wang pounded out his own love letter on his military-issue keyboard. Shane watched in amused disbelief.

  "How can you fall in love with someone you've never met?" she asked.

  Wang didn't slow the pace of his typing. "We've been e-mailing each other ever since the war began. I figure if we write every day at least some of it will make it through."

  Shane laughed. "Look at yourself, Wang. You met her through a personal ad on SpaceNet. Do you even know what she looks like?"

  "No. But I love the way she thinks. And she's got a great sense of humor."

  Shane looked over Wang's shoulder at the old-fashioned e-mail communique.

  "Okay, let's say you get along great seven light-years apart. But what happens when you have to sit across a table, eye to eye? How will you kn
ow how to act with each other?"

  Wang stopped typing for a second. "Is that a question or a confession?" he asked.

  Shane had no comeback to that one. The truth was, she didn't have any kind of relationship to boast about—not even an e-mail one.

  McQueen sat in another corner of the crew's lounge, a dim corner out of view from most of the others. He took a pen to the face of his computer screen and slowly began to handwrite a letter. Only this one wasn't a love letter. And it wasn't an easy one to write.

  Cooper sat back watching as usual. He could see McQueen struggling to come up with the words. He quietly strode over and sat across from McQueen. Monk's dog tags jingled in his pocket. He pulled them out and handed them to McQueen.

  "You're writing to Monk's wife, aren't you?"

  McQueen nodded.

  "How do you know what to say?" asked Cooper.

  "I'm telling her that he was a good man. That he'll be missed."

  "Is that what it says in the regs?" asked Cooper.

  McQueen turned to him. "No, it's what it says up here." McQueen tapped a finger to his temple.

  Cooper felt himself get just a little bit angry inside, though he wasn't sure why. "How do you know what humans are feeling?" he asked.

  McQueen shrugged. "I've seen their laughter and tears, and I know."

  "Do you feel that stuff?"

  McQueen looked at him calmly. "They take us out of the at eighteen, Hawkes. You can't get those eighteen years back in a day."

  Cooper had tried to find those kinds of feelings. He had come close once—right when the war began. He remembered kneeling alone over his buddy Mike Pagodin's grave.

  He had spoken to Pags's grave, tossing out words that seemed stupidly inadequate. But he had felt something—a woeful sort of emptiness and loss. Still, he knew it must have been just a fraction of what true humans felt. He remembered wanting to feel more for his dead friend. Pags's death deserved some real emotion. But Cooper didn't quite know how to muster it. Perhaps misery and joy were things that grew in childhood. If that were the case, Cooper had no hope of ever feeling those things.

  Cooper looked around. He didn't want the other Marines to overhear this conversation. He leaned a bit closer.

  "Ever wonder what it's like to have a mother, or a father?" he whispered.

  "I don't think about what never was," McQueen said curtly. He was such a military man, he seemed to leave no room for thoughts that didn't serve the Corps.

  Cooper tried again. "Yeah, but doesn't it bother you that when you die, no blood relation's gonna be there to say words over you?"

  "The Corps is my family, Hawkes," said McQueen. "The men and women I serve with will know what to say."

  Maybe that thought gave McQueen some comfort, but it left Cooper cold.

  "You got that right," he said, feeling disgusted with McQueen.

  Nonetheless, McQueen was right. The only family Cooper had was the Corps. The trouble was, that just didn't seem like enough.

  Chapter 5

  Deep down the throat of Blood Alley, Captain Llewellyn held a banquet of prime rib for his off-duty bridge crew and the 58th Squadron. Chief Petty Officer Keats finally accepted the captain's standing invitation to dinner and attended as well, maybe because now he wouldn't be the only Tank in the room.

  The dinner conversation was almost as tough as the meat.

  "Tell me something, Colonel," said First Mate Potter, not one bite into the meal. "Why is it so hard to provide military protection for commercial freighters?"

  Potter flipped back his long hair, keeping his contemptuous stare fixed on McQueen. But it was Shane who fielded the question.

  "Because we've got a war to fight," she snapped. "We're not baby-sitters."

  McQueen never took his eyes off Potter.

  "What Lieutenant Vansen means," he said calmly, "is that the resources of Allied Star Command are stretched a little thin."

  "No," Shane said. "What I mean is that I'm tired of taking garbage from people who are too selfish to care about the war effort."

  Wang smirked. "Don't mind Shane," he said. "She thinks she's at war with everyone."

  Nathan laughed at that. Shane threw him an icy glance.

  "It's great to have real food, Captain," Damphousse offered, in an attempt to restore the peace. She smiled as she chewed the gristly meat. Tough as it was, it was far better than their usual freeze-dried rations. At least this stuff gave their jaws some exercise.

  Cooper Hawkes kept to himself for most of the meal. His mouth was full of meat, but it was his mind that was doing the chewing—mulling over a single question. Finally he dared to ask it.

  "Captain, the In-Vitro manifest—"

  Keats threw a warning glance over at Cooper. "Cooper..." he started to interrupt.

  Cooper ignored him. "I'd like to see the manifest, Captain."

  Before Captain Llewellyn could answer, Potter had a snide comment ready.

  "You know what he's trying to do, Captain—the same thing they all do. Look for 'family.'" Potter turned his cold eyes on Cooper. "No offense, but how can something grown in a tank consider itself 'related' to anything else?" He chuckled. "Except maybe algae."

  "Stuff a sock in it, Potter," said Llewellyn, a bit too late.

  Potter and Cooper locked eyes. There was no telling how far this might have gone, if Blood Alley hadn't interrupted with some ideas of its own.

  BOOM! A sudden jolt rocked the ship, knocking the half-eaten dinner off the table. BOOM! A second jolt, just as powerful, sent the ship shimmying and pitching like an ocean freighter caught in a tempest.

  "What the devil was that?" yelled Llewellyn, scrambling to his feet.

  A piercing alarm cut through the confusion.

  "Secure the cargo holds," Llewellyn shouted over the blare. "Take a damage control team aft."

  "I'm on it." Keats ran from the havoc of the dining room.

  McQueen ordered his officers to assist the crew. There was no telling what trouble the twin stars outside had gotten them into.

  In the engine room, the alarms were blaring full volume—even drowning out the roar of the engines. Foreman Ashby fumbled with his glasses, trying to read the gauges. Chief Engineer Sorrell beat him to it.

  "Coolant temp's spiked to seven hundred!" he yelled over the noise. In all his years on the freighter, it had never jumped that high.

  "Take it off-line!" shouted Ashby, over the screaming alarms. "Take it all off-line—Now!"

  Sorrell scrambled to the control console. He threw the switches to shut down the reactor, plunging the ship into absolute darkness. The only light came from the eerie glow of the overheating reactor.

  The alarms died with the power. Now the only sound was the clanging and grinding of the backup generators struggling to restore power. Finally, they kicked in. The lights came back on.

  Llewellyn, Potter, and the 58th flooded onto the bridge. Llewellyn was instantly on the radio.

  "Engine room, this is the captain. How bad is it?"

  "Reactor's scrammed," he heard Ashby shout. "We're off-line; the core's unstable."

  Llewellyn turned to the radio operator. "SOS the deep-space network." But the radio operator just shook his head.

  "All radio systems are down," he said. "So's radar. It's like pea soup out there, Captain."

  They were drifting blind between two angry stars. The captain paced, unsure of what to do next. "Okay, what hit us?" he asked.

  "Solar flare," answered the navigator.

  Potter stood calmly, hands clasped behind his back. "What else do you expect when you fly between two unstable suns?"

  McQueen stepped forward. "What's your weapons package?" he asked the captain.

  Potter sneered. "Weapons? Do you propose we fight the solar flare?"

  McQueen ignored him. "Your weapons, Captain. Please."

  "Two laser-pulse cannons on a forward chin mount," the captain answered. "But those weapons aren't manned."

  McQueen nodded
. "Vansen, Wang."

  They didn't need any further invitation. The two Marines took off toward the front of the ship, in search of the laser-pulse cannons.

  Potter stood glaring at McQueen.

  "I want you mid-ship with Keats," the captain ordered Potter. Anything to get Potter off the bridge. "Yes, sir," Potter sneered as he strode off.

  After Potter was gone, McQueen turned to Llewellyn. "Captain, we can't be certain that this was a solar flare."

  The captain nodded. "Under the circumstances, I think there's room for two on the bridge."

  McQueen instantly went to work. He put Nathan on the radar and sent Damphousse to the engine room. Then he pulled Cooper aside and spoke to him quietly. "Go down and work with Keats," McQueen whispered. "I want one of us on damage control."

  "Keats is one of us," said Cooper.

  McQueen's eyes became cold. "I mean a Marine, Hawkes."

  Cooper turned to go, hoping to slip past that misunderstanding. But McQueen grabbed his arm, yanking him to a standstill. "Forget the In-Vitro manifest, Hawkes." McQueen spoke in the toughest voice he had ever used with a member of the 58th. "The 58th is your family. Looking for a past you never lived can only get you hurt."

  Cooper kept his eyes locked on McQueen. He wasn't intimidated by the colonel's threatening voice. "Getting hurt's part of being human," he said.

  McQueen's response was icy. "Who said you're human?"

  Cooper spun on his heel and stormed off, feeling the sting of McQueen's words. Why couldn't McQueen understand that nothing would drive the list of In-Vitro cargo out of his mind completely?

  At mid-ship, Cooper caught up with Keats and a few others from the engine room. The men were trying desperately to fight a fire that had broken out in the cargo hold. Across from it, liquid nitrogen spilled out of a cryo-container. They were fighting fire and ice.

  Cooper grabbed a fire extinguisher and helped put out the last of the blaze. While Potter went to work sealing the cryo-leak, the crew spread out to inspect the other seals and temperature gauges on the many cargo containers around them. Cooper noticed that they inspected only the ones filled with the frozen human cargo. No one bothered to check Section 46, where the unborn In-Vitros were. Not even Keats.