Confused, I lay there, staring. “Sir?”
“Well,” Rudyard said, “Mr. Ferguson and I think you’re the ideal candidate for the mission. Impeccable character. Resourceful.”
And, I thought to myself with horror, dispensable.
Five
Over bad coffee at morning tea, Janning asked me, “And what did you say?” We were in the Officer’s Mess. The displays on the wall this time were all showing views of the artifact.
I sipped my fabbed coffee, taking it slow. The bots were almost finished fixing my insides, but I was still tender in a lot of places. There was other damage the bots could never reach. I didn’t remember everything the enlisted men did to me, but the doctor had been quite specific listing my assorted injuries. Nothing was broken, and the bruises were already clearing up.
As far as the doc could tell, I hadn’t been violated. I nodded after hearing this detail. Back at the Academy, if you screwed up particularly badly, there was just about no limit to what the provosts might do to you to make you sincerely regret not conforming to proper cadet behavior, and they weren’t above rape, as I well knew.
It was the atom bomb of cadet punishment, used rarely, but when it was used, it left an impression across the whole Academy. Cadets who had been through it said, if they were able to talk about it, that you were left wishing they had just killed you and been done with it.
Deciding that I’d gotten off lightly for my first offence, I resolved, lying in the Infirmary that morning, that I would try to become a model officer. Except I also remembered seeing Sorcha next to me, bruises and cuts healing as I watched. It’s difficult now to convey the anger I felt about what they had tried to do to her.
“Well?” Janning prompted me back to the present. He had come to fetch me from the Infirmary earlier, saying that he had to look after his people. I hadn’t told him what happened, but I suspected he already knew.
“I said ‘Yes, sir, whatever you say, sir.’ What else could I say?”
Janning dunked a shortbread biscuit in his black tea. “There is that.” He looked thoughtful, staring at the displays. “Why you, though, Dunne?”
“The captain said I was resourceful and of good character.”
“And you are, aren’t you? I’ve seen your Academy record. You did very well. Upper half of your graduating class. Decent marks throughout. And you got a space rotation right after graduation. Lesser graduates are stuck ashore for months waiting for an assignment.”
I looked at him. “You think the captain meant what he said about me?” It was hard to believe.
“You’re too hard on yourself, James. Believe in yourself more. This is a real honor the captain’s given you here.”
Thinking about it, I couldn’t see why Janning would lie to me.
And, looking at those displays, the strange misshapen alien ship out there, I had to admit it looked like exactly the kind of thing for which I had signed onto the Service. A grand adventure among the stars. If exploring the first alien ship ever discovered wasn’t a grand adventure, well, I didn’t know what was! Quite apart from the shocking notion that other beings, non-human beings built this vessel and sent her on her way, there was also the exciting and terrifying prospect that some of these beings might be aboard. How would we deal with that? Centuries of science fiction and philosophical speculation would, I thought, turn out to be unhelpful when faced with the real thing. I imagined the captain and his senior staff trying to plan for every imaginable contingency, all the while knowing that they could only plan for things about which they could make intelligent guesses. What if we encountered something genuinely new over there? I allowed myself a small smile, thinking that Ferguson would almost certainly take the view that if necessary they’d just blow up the alien ship and be done with it.
And it was an epochal event. I felt warily lucky to have been chosen for the team, even if I couldn’t quite fathom why someone with no experience like me was even going along, when there must be several people on this ship better qualified. I even caught myself feeling a flutter of excitement over the prospect. Maybe Ferguson and the captain figured I’d learned my lesson and were ready to treat me like a regular officer, with appropriate duties. I certainly felt like I’d learned the lesson, learned it well. Don’t rock the boat.
“James?” Janning was waving a hand before my eyes.
“Oh. Sorry, sir. Just thinking.” My coffee was going cold. I was staring at the displays.
“Pretty daunting prospect, though, I would’ve thought. Who knows what the hell things are like over there.”
“True,” I said, and sipped some coffee.
“I could probably get you out of it; need you for urgent training, priority matters, that kind of thing. If you like.”
Looking at him, I saw that he was trying to help me, and I liked that. “It’s all right, sir. I want to go. It’s the chance of a lifetime, right?”
Janning saw the same ship I saw, but his face didn’t register excitement. He looked very uneasy about it. “If you’re sure it’s what you want.”
“Mr. Janning, I slogged my guts out through four long miserable years at that joke of a bloody Academy entirely so that I could have a shot at something like this.” I hadn’t realised quite how tightly I was holding my cup. My knuckles were white. There was a trembling edge to my voice, a note of anger I hadn’t intended. Taking a breath, I put my cup down and sat back in the chair.
Janning looked startled. “Mr. Dunne — James. Are you…?”
He meant, was I all right? And, truth be told, I didn’t feel all right. I felt squeezed from about nine directions at once. All I wanted, when I signed on to the Service, was to do my best, make the most of my humble talents, and have a quiet, steady sort of career, and see the stars. I certainly didn’t expect what was now laid before me. What if I screwed up? You didn’t want to find yourself in the middle of perhaps the biggest event in human history — and screwing up. You didn’t want history to remember you as a fool.
Once I’d settled down a little, I confided some of this anxiety to Janning. He nodded. “Thought it might be something like that. Entirely understandable. I mean, that’s partly why I offered to get you out of it.”
I shrugged. “What I don’t understand is, why me? This is an exploration ship, right? There must be loads of people on board who’d jump at the chance to—”
Janning put his hand up to interrupt. He looked awkward. Leaning forward, whispering, he said, “James, just between you and me and the fab machine, nobody wants to go to that ship. The captain asked for volunteers among those officers you mentioned. They all turned out to be sick, or busy with paperwork, or on study leave, or whatever. And, frankly, I wouldn’t go over there, either.”
“Sir?”
“I’ve got a family, James. Kids. And that ship out there, I mean it’s just … I don’t know, there’s something not right about it.” I thought I saw him shudder; he looked pale.
I frowned, thinking about it. “Nobody volunteered? Nobody?”
“There’s Blackmore and Grantleigh, of course, too senior in their departments to get out of it, but everyone else just plain refused. The captain’s furious, but he’s not doing anything about it. He understands their reluctance. And besides, he’s got Ferguson to go for him. You can imagine the blazing row they had over that!”
“So, what … I’m there to make up the numbers?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite so bluntly, but…” He cocked his head a little.
I shook my head sadly.
“Plus,” Janning went on, “they do think you have real promise.”
I nearly swore. Neither of us said anything for a while. Then Janning said, “Anyway, we can squeeze your sim training around the mission, once you get back.”
“Sounds good, sir. My apologies for the ou
tburst, sir.”
He waved his hand. “No worries.”
We sat silently for some time. Janning got me a fresh coffee; he replaced his tea.
The alien ship was a strange-looking thing. Early reports from the science crew indicated it might be some kind of hollowed-out asteroid, but with bits added on and other alterations. They also said it showed signs of profound age, indicated by micrometeoroid impacts consistent with being in space for thousands of years. Now it was adrift and tumbling, with no detectable power or EM emissions. Janning looked back at the displays, “Ugly bastard, eh?”
“It isn’t pretty, that’s for sure.”
“Techs say it’s something like five-k’s long, did you know that?”
I nodded. Rudyard had arranged for me to receive all info regarding the artifact via dedicated feed straight to my headware. I was aware of my buffers filling with data even as I sat here sipping bad coffee.
“You don’t suppose there’s, you know … actual…” Janning could hardly bring himself to say the word.
“Aliens, sir?” I arched an eyebrow.
He looked uncomfortable, fidgety. “Well, yeah, frankly.”
“I don’t know, sir. I suppose there’s only one way to find out,” I said. The question of whether or not I was going on the Contact mission sorted, I was back thinking about Sorcha, and about the apparent nasty undercurrents of shipboard life. My sense of excitement had ebbed; now I felt tense for different reasons.
Janning frowned and looked hard at me. “Are you all right, Dunne? I know you had a nasty fall last night and all…”
Closing my eyes for a moment, I set my coffee mug down on the table and sighed. “Mr. Janning,” I opened, “permission to speak freely and off the record?”
He looked surprised, no doubt thinking we had a better rapport going than I did. “Uh, of course, yes.” He gestured at me to go on but now frowning.
I explained what really happened last night, and that it wasn’t some random spasm of violence. “Either the captain or Ferguson sent them.” And saying this, I found myself glancing at the nearby walls and ceiling, looking for the faint telltale sheen of surveillance spray. It was impossible to see from this angle.
Janning did not look shocked. He put his own cup down. “Why did Miss Riley feel so threatened?” he asked.
“Sir, how long since you were at the Academy?”
Janning looked up at the ceiling, mumbling and counting on his fingers. “Twenty-four years. Why?”
“What were cadet initiation rituals like then?”
He flashed a wide carousing sort of grin. “Perfectly harmless fun. Nothing to worry about. You know.”
This wasn’t going anywhere. “Let’s just say things aren’t so harmless and amusing these days. Sorcha had reason to worry about senior officers who are used to getting what they want.”
Janning began to get it, but he still didn’t understand. He just nodded. And I explained my plan, the one that had backfired so hugely.
Janning couldn’t suppress a laugh. “That was your real offense right there, Dunne.”
“I don’t understand.”
He said, leaning across, so I didn’t misunderstand, “You tried to gain power over the powerful. And they caught you at it, the same as they catch everyone who tries it. Why do you think newbies like you are put in the Hole first thing? They want to see what you’re really like. Not what your record says you’re like, or your school history and psych evaluations; but who you really are.”
I felt stupid. “So what do we do about what happened to Sorcha and me last night?”
Janning sighed. “You know I can’t answer that. The official record indicates you had a nasty fall in the middle of the night. Miss Riley ran into some defective disposable troops, dispatched them, and will be fine.”
I covered my face with my hands, trying to come to grips with all this. “And now I get to visit an alien spacecraft. Who knows what might happen to me there?” I said this with the correct degree of irony to convey the sense of doom I felt.
Janning had the honesty to say sadly, “I think that would be the captain’s thinking, yes.”
I swore quietly, and said, “Yes, sir. It is.”
Janning sipped his tea. “When do you go?”
“I don’t know. Later. They haven’t told me.” I tapped my head.
“Make sure you hit the sims hard in the meantime, then.”
I stared at him. Somehow he had found a way to exist on this ship without losing his mind. On one hand he was sympathetic, which seemed genuine. But on the other hand, he was also part of the same culture to which the captain and Ferguson belonged, that did not see abuse of power as a glitch in the system, but as the system itself. Right then, I couldn’t see how to get my head into that culture. I’d been on the wrong end of all kinds of abusive crap most of my life, and thought that after I left the Academy I was done with it at long last. My new life would be different. Life among the stars would be clean and bright, the way space itself looked in pictures. But space, when you got out amongst it, was full of dirt and frozen muck and piss.
I wondered how I was going to fit in.
I would have to look past what had happened to Sorcha. Could I see it as a kind of discipline?
Morning tea over, Janning clapped me on the shoulder and shooed me off to the care of Simulations Training Officer Hinz.
Hours passed. Locked inside the simulator egg, my body and brain were learning things without my conscious mind ever getting involved; I wasn’t even aware of the time. I was scheduled for an early lunch that day which was bland fabbed food, rather than anything real — operating budgets didn’t allow for real food at every meal. I ate in a hurry, feeling a sick dread that Sorcha would walk in at any moment. I didn’t know what she’d say, and I didn’t want to know. My meal wolfed down, I headed back to the sims, back to that dreamless dark of subconscious education. When one of Hinz’s junior officers later cracked open the shell, she told me it was 1540, and that the captain wanted to see me immediately, in the cloud. I plugged in where I was.
“Mr. Dunne. How are you feeling now?” Captain Rudyard said from the head of the table. Ferguson was next to him, along with two other officers I didn’t know.
I swallowed and cleared my throat. “Much improved, thank you, sir. Thoughtful of you to ask.” I glanced around. A moving holographic image of the artifact floated over the center of the table — a real-time feed from one of the many sensorbots studying it. I could almost feel the data feed impinging on my mind, full of the latest findings. The ready indicator icon flashed in the corner of my visual field; I checked the feed and blinked as a wealth of knowledge appeared in my conscious mind. The artifact was not a hollowed out asteroid after all, but was a manufactured structure. Current estimates of age said it was perhaps four to five thousand years old. Its power plant might be a form of high-efficiency matter-conversion system, and that the vast size of the structure was because the ship itself was possibly the power plant’s fuel supply: it consumed itself in order to fly. The data feed went on, describing the surface of the object as an aggregate of small planetoids and meteoroids, cometary material, gas ice, metal slag, and that as fast as the vehicle burned its fuel it harvested more, sticking the stuff on the hull for later use.
“Dunne, you know Mr. Ferguson, of course.”
Ferguson nodded, a sly gleam in his steely eye. No trace of the avuncular old chap there today. I did my damnedest to look him in the eye, to show him I knew what was going on. Part of me was determined to do something about “things”, even as another part of me was keen to conform and bury my outrage.
“And these officers are from Astronomy and Planetary Sciences…”
Rudyard handed the meeting over to SSO6 Kevin Grantleigh of astronomy. He was a tall, ascetic-looking man with hair going
to white and blue eyes full of an austere curiosity; he looked older than the captain, too. He said, his voice rich and surprisingly deep, “Good afternoon, Mr. Dunne. The captain and Mr. Ferguson have told me that you are a promising young officer.”
“I hope so, Dr. Grantleigh, sir,” I babbled nervously, shifting in my sim egg.
Grantleigh, his face rendered with fine detail, peered at me, his eyes taking note of my nervousness. “How does it feel to be part of history, son?”
“I really don’t know, sir. It’s rather overwhelming. I don’t know what to think.” My answer had the virtue of truth, at least. The prospect of the unknown was frankly terrifying; and the thought that, nice words from the captain and Ferguson aside, this might be a covert punishment detail also weighed heavily on me. And I knew they’d never tell me the truth.
“You are perhaps wondering,” he said, steepling long pale fingers before his likewise long nose, “why we’ve chosen you to join this Contact Team?”
I looked around. I saw Mr. Ferguson fiddling with a small black object, rolling it in his hand — a chess pawn. Captain Rudyard, I noticed, was fiddling with a white pawn. What was that about? Both men watched me with vividly rendered eyes. I was frustrated by the sense that there was far more going on than I knew.
To Grantleigh, I said, “I do not question my orders, sir. If I’ve been chosen for this mission, I’ll carry it out as best I can, sir.” I was almost shouting. And thinking the whole time about what Janning had said before about how I was just a warm body they needed to make up the numbers because everyone else, the qualified people, weaselled out when the captain put the hard word on them. Leaving me, with no experience, and no wife and kids to compensate if something went badly wrong, to take care of the mission’s scut work. Yes, I was going to be part of history, and under other circumstances the opportunity might seem fabulous, scut work notwithstanding. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that this might all be a test to see if their troublemaker junior officer had learned his lesson. If I had, I got to come back to Eclipse. If not, there might be a tragic accident involving scary alien life forms. I could see that scenario playing out, too.
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