Spaced

by Greg Curtis

It was nevertheless a good thing to have, especially if it kept the ship happy. And the ship was finally happy. They were alive. The Nightingale was in better shape than it had feared. The translation drive was in one piece – it was only the coolant system which had failed. And its Captain finally seemed to be making better calls in its view. Carm had even made it to the gym for a session on the cycle, something the ship was almost ecstatic about. Sometimes it went for whole hours without delivering a cutting remark.

  For his part Carm was mostly relieved that the Navy hadn't come after them. But he'd forgotten about the speed of the mesh. Within hours the word was out. Within a day what he'd sent was the lead item on every news channel. The Navy was at war with an enemy it had created? They'd been lying about it for six hundred years? Defrauding the Commonwealth? Even killing civilians in the name of their fraud? How could it not be top of the news?

  Every news reporter in the Commonwealth was now out there hustling for more information. Every admiral that could be found was being interviewed morning, noon and night by every channel. “No comment” simply wasn't good enough. And if they dared to leave their buildings, a plague of citizen reporters would be on them. If they didn't of course, that same plague would be harassing every other naval officer they could find. There were ten billion people on Earth, and that was ten billion citizen reporters.

  Naval Command hadn't come after him not because it didn't want to – it simply didn't have the time. It was in damage control mode. The fires were raging out of control and it had to put everything it had into putting them out. Against that he simply wasn't a priority and that was more than fine by Carm. Sooner or later someone would put together the activity in his accounts with the fact that he was supposedly spaced and start thinking. Until then he was a nobody and that was as it should be.

  “Harlow's calling.” The ship interrupted while he exercised. He wasn't completely sure why he was doing it – he'd hardly ever used the gym before. But the ship seemed to like the gesture and Del had told him off at length for his flabby ways. Maybe some of that had stuck.

  “Flash him up.”

  “Store's closed.” Harlow didn't waste any time on pleasantries making the announcement. He seldom wasted time on such matters, unless there were credits to be made, and he knew there weren't because Carm had told him repeatedly that he was bust.

  Closing the store was unlike Harlow. He'd only known the man a day, but the one thing he was sure of was that if there was any chance of making credits he would be open for it. His smile was missing too. Something was wrong.

  “Alright. Why?”

  “Naval Command's declared a state of military emergency. They're locking down jump points and seizing space-based assets.”

  “What?! Shards! Here in Sol?” Carm was shocked, and even more so when he saw the old pirate nod. But he understood what was happening immediately.

  The information he'd sent had gone live just under two standard days before, and as he'd hoped it had embarrassed the Navy. In fact it had humiliated them. That hadn't been his true goal. He just wanted to stop them. And he had done that. From the millisecond the information had gone out the Navy had found itself under the electron microscope. Every action they’d taken was being examined, re-examined and then weighed and measured. Every decision they’d made and were making was being double checked. And every fault was being exposed. The Navy had been crippled.

  There had been top level meetings, admirals summoned to speak to committees. There had been talk of hearings and budget cuts, of a complete reshuffle of Naval Command starting at the top. Carm had gathered they meant a lot of admirals were about to be fired, and some would be going to the courts followed by jail. That had seemed like a good thing to him. But again that wasn't important.

  Now hopefully back on Aquaria, the Navy’s pogrom would grind to a halt. One minute they’d been heroes and defenders of the realm, battling a deadly enemy bent on the destruction of the Commonwealth and the next they were liars and criminals desperately killing off a secret society so they could cover up details of their sordid past. It wasn't about a dangerous enemy. And that was something that could not be allowed to continue.

  So if they had had any common sense the Navy would have stopped their witch-hunt in a heartbeat, and tried to hide the worst of their excesses. They would have finished matters before they went too far. It was better when you were going to be caught for a smaller mistake than a bigger one. That had been his thinking.

  Carm only wished he knew for certain what had happened. At around the same time his information had gone out, Aquaria had gone completely dark. The hourly news had stopped and ships were no longer arriving or departing the system either. That meant information wasn't coming out or going in either. Carm could only hope that that meant the Navy had shut their operations down so it could clean up the mess it had made in private. But he feared it was something else.

  Still it had to be, he hoped. Difficult questions were being asked and they couldn't be seen to be committing more crimes. It would be a long time before the mutes would ever be seen as anything other than monsters by most, but the thorny issue of civil rights had been raised and top of the list of questions was what was happening to those they’d caught? When they were deadly enemies and monsters, it had been okay to simply lock them up and perhaps even kill them. Those others who had died were simply collateral damage. But when the monsters were suddenly victims, everything that might once have been alright no longer was.

  For the past two days Carm imagined that the Navy must have been busy creating false records as fast as they knew how: moving prisoners from interrogation cells to containment facilities, desperately working to prove that they'd acted humanely at all times. And no doubt burying the bodies while preparing for inspection. It wouldn't be a perfect victory – there was no such thing. But if the Navy was busy repairing its image and stopping its ethnic cleansing, that was the victory he had to take.

  Even Del should be happy. She undoubtedly wanted to kill him. And she would be absolutely furious with him for releasing the information. But surely she wasn't completely unreasonable – he hoped! I If they ever met again she’d understand - perhaps after a few years had passed or a few centuries. And this shouldn't have got any hostages killed. If anything it should have got them freed.

  But what Harlow was telling him suggested something else was happening. In the end there had always been two possible responses the Navy could have given: they could have accepted the humiliation, acknowledged their failures, cleaned up their mess and lived with the consequences. Or they could fight it. He had thought that they were going for the former option. But suddenly it seemed that they had decided to fight. He hadn't expected that. The Commonwealth surely hadn't expected it.

  None of that mattered though. Not if Naval Command were coming out with all guns blazing. If they were seizing space based assets, that meant they were tipping their hat at another, bigger target than the mutes – they were going after the Commonwealth.

  But why? He didn't understand it. What would make Naval Command take such a risk? And did it have something to do with the news blackout on Aquaria? For two days they'd heard nothing about what was happening. All travel was down and in the end if ships couldn't fly, news couldn't flow.

  Could something have happened there? Something that they couldn't cover up?

  “Have they said why?”

  “They're saying it's a military emergency.” The trader shrugged, clearly believing not a word of it. “They say the mutes are preparing to attack.”

  Of course the trader didn't believe it. Carm didn't. No one would. Two days after being exposed as liars, fraudsters and killers they were expecting an attack from a group of people who had never attacked before? Even a dark side botbrain wouldn't believe that. Still for the moment Carm realised that he had to keep his thoughts on the matter at hand. That was the trader fleeing. And there was no doubt that that was exactly what Harlow was doing. So
he asked him straight up.

  “You're fleeing aren't you?” Of course he was. He'd made his credits and now Harlow was getting on a ship and running while it was good. He'd come back when the dust settled – maybe. A lot of others were going to do the same.

  “Got kin on New Britain. I'll go and stay with them for a while.”

  He was lying Carm guessed. Not that he had kin, but that they were on New Britain. Given what was happening there was no point in staying on any Commonwealth world. The chances were that Harlow was an outlier and he was going back to his clan. The Navy were on their way. He was a “space based asset” and he had to be gone before they seized his ship and found out everything he didn't want them to know.

  “I'm not finished with my repairs yet, but I'll unhitch and float in thirty. Give my regards to your clan.”

  Harlow didn't bother responding, not even to his insinuation that he was an outlier. His image vanished as fast as it had appeared, and Carm guessed he had things to do. The one thing he was curious about was whether his ship was the ancient colonizer, or if he had another smaller one somewhere. He'd never seen a colonizer fly before and he was curious to see if it still could.

  “Alright ship,” Carm sighed. He'd hoped for at least a couple more days to complete the work. “Let’s bring the reactor back to life and prepare to un-tether. Use the thrusters to back us away a little and keep a watch for any ships heading our way.”

  “And a course?”

  “Don't know. Are you in shape to jump?”

  “As far as I can be sure. All systems are within acceptable parameters. My new bot has done a full inspection of the drives and reactor and found no major issues, though I still want it to do a complete breakdown and service at some point. The repairs are complete. This has been a good day for me – as long as you don't mess it up mush brain.”

  “I'll try not to. But we've done what we came to do and we need to get out of here. The Mars jump point isn't that far away and the Aquarius Four asteroid belt is only another jump away, and it'll be a good place to stay for a while and continue with the work. Don't you think?”

  “It sounds logical,” the ship sounded hesitant. Maybe it didn't like the idea of agreeing with Carm. “As long as we aren't doing any more jumping for a while?”

  “Good. We've done what we needed to. I have no plans of making any more jumps. Just sitting and listening to the channels on Aquaria. But take a complete set of translation coordinates here before we go just in case. If the worst comes to the worst we are not jumping wild again.” But he was conscious as he said it that they still had the translation coordinates for the asteroid belt just beyond Aquarius Four. Once they had the coordinates locked in they could be there half a second later, and no one would be searching for them. No one else had those coordinates, and no one would even think about searching that part of space. If the Aquarian Navy was looking for incoming ships, as they surely were, they would expect visitors to come through the Aquarius jump point, and would be pointing all their sensors at it.

  Once they were back in Aquarius they could continue the repairs and simultaneously find out what was happening on Aquaria. They could see what they'd achieved, if they'd achieved anything at all, and he could continue scouring the mesh for his family. But he had a horrible feeling that they hadn't achieved what he'd hoped to. All they'd done was force the Navy’s hand, and now he feared, everything was poised on a knife edge.

  The Navy could still back down – and they might be doing that even now. He couldn't imagine that they would have anything close to one hundred percent support for trying to overthrow the Commonwealth – and that was exactly what they'd have to do if they carried on. This was a desperate move.

  Whatever course the Navy charted, Carm could be absolutely certain of two things. It was all going to be his fault and neither Del nor Kendra was going to be happy. It was just sharding lucky that neither of them knew where he was.

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  “Oh shards!” Carm swore at the holo. “You bastards! You bot-brained bastards!”

  He'd been sitting in the lounge staring at the holo swearing for hours. It was better than screaming – or crying – both of which he wanted to do. Ever since they'd arrived back in Aquarius and had seen the feeds he'd been that way. His spirit was broken – there was only one news item on any of the channels: the massacre.

  The news was everywhere and was being shown from every angle in all its horror. Filmed by a million recorders, reported by a million citizen journalists. And there could be no doubt about what had gone down.

  Hundreds, maybe thousands, dead. No one knew how many because no one could enter the battlefield. So many of them were police and too many of them were children. And none of them had stood a chance against warbots.

  How could they have done it?! What utter dark side shards had been running through the Aquarian Navy's heads? Why bring heavily armed warbots to a peaceful march?! Why open fire, especially when the police were among them?! So many appallingly bad decisions made by a Navy that knew it was being watched. The Aquarian naval detachment had to know what would happen if they started shooting civilians. They had to have understood the consequences of opening fire, and yet they'd still done it.

  According to Del the Navy had kept mutes in permanent internment camps, kept alive because the Navy absolutely dreaded what would happen if it was ever learned that they'd been executing prisoners. They'd been doing so ever since the war had ended. Surely, if she was right, that proved they had some working braincells? And if Naval Command knew that they couldn't simply murder people, the Aquarian Navy knew it too. So how could they go from that to this?

  No matter how he tried, he just couldn't get his head around it.

  If only they'd been quicker. That thought kept bouncing around in his head. Just a few hours. That was all it would have taken. If the word of the Navy’s massive deceit had got out even two or three hours sooner then this would never have happened. The Navy would have backed off, the march would have gone peacefully. As far as he could tell the massacre had occurred at almost exactly the same time they'd jumped to Sol. And because of that everything had gone wrong. Comedians said that timing was everything in their business. It seemed the same was true in tragedy.

  Now everything was set for disaster. There were some mistakes you could never come back from and this was one of them. The moment someone had given the order to fire, the Navy’s course had been set.

  Surely, the Navy had known they'd gone too far? They had shut down Aquaria completely in a desperate attempt to steal some time even if it was only for a few hours. It was time they needed to work out what to do: to come up with an explanation, to find someone to blame. They needed every hour they could get. So no ships in or out, no news escaping the planet. They could never be known for the monstrous act they'd committed.

  But then word had undoubtedly got back to them from Sol of the exposure of their dirtiest secret, and all their plans had fallen apart. Because the instant it had got out that the Navy was running a pogrom against the mutes purely for credits they were doomed. There could be no explanation for what they'd done. And it wasn't a matter of who got blamed – they would all be charged and found guilty. They would either spend the rest of their lives in cold, grey cells or be executed. There was no possible defence.

  So what had started as a desperate attempt by the local naval detachment to gain themselves a few hours to plot their way out of a mess had become a permanent course. They didn't want to die. So they tightened their grip on the planet and the tragedy grew. One wrongful death witnessed led to a cover up, and the cover up required another wrongful death. One man escaping with word of the massacre could not be allowed. Not even if they had to kill him.

  This would not end, Carm knew as he studied the feeds. It would not even slow down. Instead it would spread out like a star going nova until it consumed the entire world. It was already well under way.

  Even a
s he studied the mesh there were stories coming in of more attacks. Of space-ports being bombed as the Navy made absolutely sure that no one was getting off-world. Space stations had been destroyed. Police stations were being levelled. The Navy had apparently decided the police were part of the mute conspiracy. The only known jump point to the system from the Commonwealth was being guarded and the ships of those arriving were either seized or destroyed.

  As for spacers, they were becoming an endangered species. There were reports that they were being rounded up like criminals and Carm didn't need a crystal ball to know why. They knew the truth. They had ships. They were witnesses. And there could be none of those.

  The bad timing cut both ways. It had also smashed Naval Command's plans to pieces. And from that moment the order to fire had been given their course too had been set.

  If there hadn't been six hundred years of lies exposed, Naval Command would have stepped in on the right side of this disaster. There would have been arrests, followed by courts-martial and executions. The Navy still had the death penalty. But Naval Command couldn’t do that because they were as deeply entangled in this fiasco as their officers on Aquaria.

  They'd held out for as long as they could. For a day, nearly two, they'd been dealing with the fallout from the exposure of their six hundred year-long fraud. They’d confessed their crimes, accepted censure from the Commonwealth while desperately attempting to find a positive light under which to show their actions. But only a few hours after their crime had been shown to the worlds they'd found themselves living on borrowed time. Every day, every hour, every minute, that passed was time in which the secret of Aquaria would be let out. And when it was, they would be held responsible.

  That was why Naval Command had launched their coup. It didn't matter they were in Sol, that they hadn't given the order. This had happened under their watch. They had started the pogrom which had led to this. And they were as guilty as those who’d pulled the triggers.