Eclipse

by K. A. Bedford

“Go on, Mr. Dunne, please.” She looked neither encouraging nor hostile, and quietly sipped her coffee.

  Trying to work some moisture into my mouth, I said, “I’m not surprised that so many of the people who used to be part of the HSC now want to be with people like themselves, but then I, if you’ll pardon my speaking at such, er, length, also used to hear my father say that the HSC government didn’t try very hard to keep anyone.” After all, it wasn’t that everyone else had deserted the Home System; it was one of the most densely populated star systems in human space. The problem was that so many residents of the Home System were citizens of other states.

  “Interesting, very interesting. What do you then say to the argument that the government’s moral mandate is to fight the chaos of the universe?”

  “Uh, Admiral?”

  “It’s an important issue, Mr. Dunne. Don’t they still teach you this at the Academy? I mean to say, ever since the death of Earth, we humans have striven to avenge our world’s loss by whatever means, correct?”

  I was aware that most governments in human space had loose co-operative programs aimed at trying to work out, despite the indefinite United Nations embargoes on all data pertaining to the home world’s loss, just what had happened to Earth, and that one of the leading contenders among all the competing theories was that aliens had done it. This theory had always been quite untenable, however, since we knew of no aliens against whom to take our revenge. But now we did. Could there be others?

  “Of course, ma’am,” I said, not sure where she was going with this. As dangerous as the universe often seemed, I didn’t think it stacked up much against the danger I was feeling right here in this office. What was going on with the admiral?

  The admiral put her cup on the coffee table. She leaned back, getting comfortable, hands clasped around her knee. “Were you aware that the HSC Lords and Admiralty are planning to downsize the Service?” She said this in the sort of quiet voice that masks profound outrage.

  I tried to keep my face from exhibiting the complete shock I felt. “Ma’am?”

  “They want to cut starship operations and support personnel by at least thirty percent, perhaps more, depending on the government’s political will and the mood of the citizens — which right now is leaning against live humans being in space. Widespread mothballing of ships, perhaps forty or fifty vessels in all, including at least four of the six Eclipse-class ships.” She paused to let out a breath. “They’re toying with the idea of using advanced disposables and ­autonomous starships for exploration in future. Human ­beings are considered too valuable to risk out here.”

  This was overwhelming. I fought to maintain my composure. I knew Eclipse was an old ship by today’s standards, but I thought she’d probably have at least another five or ten years left, with regular system upgrades and refitting. As for the mood of the people back home, it was hard not to notice that there was a constant background hum of talk about the fear of war with the Asiatic ­Co­operation Metasphere, among others. Maybe exploration into the dark had gone far enough, that it was time to divide up what we already had. Even though what we had was starting to seem like not enough anymore.

  “If you will excuse me, ma’am,” I said, now very glad I had declined a drink, “I am not sure why you are sharing Service policy information with a junior officer like myself.”

  “You’re right to be confused, Mr. Dunne. Normally an SSO1 wouldn’t know what had hit him until he was dumped outside the base gates back on Ganymede with his discharge papers and kit bag. When the cutbacks come around, the last ones on are the first ones off.”

  I knew she was right. I had seen the Service shed staff before in response to changing needs and missions, and always striving to be “a lean, mean Service,” as their PR drones liked to say. Yet I had noticed that somehow senior command staff always managed to keep their posts.

  Greaves got up, paced slowly back and forth, deep in thought. I noticed she could move about twelve paces in this room alone before having to turn. This much space for a single officer on a starship was unthinkable. I remembered reading about the Home System Service flagship Earthrise, from fifty years ago, before the present Royal Interstellar Service existed. The whole ship was just under two hundred meters long; the admiral’s quarters were the size of two closets — like a monastic cell, only not as roomy. Things had been so different then; it had cost a fortune to put people out in space. But now it cost a great deal more to ignore the opportunities space offered.

  I noticed Admiral Greaves was agitated about something. She said, not looking my way, “In two days’ time, Mr. Dunne, Captain Rudyard will stand before a board of inquiry consisting of some of my most senior officers. Excellent people, all handpicked. There will be much posturing and yelling and formality and citing of regulations and similar nonsense.”

  “Admiral?” Where was all this leading? I was confused. First she was talking about taming the universe, and now she was going on about Rudyard’s future.

  She glared at me. “Listen, I’m trying to help you.”

  I thought for an anxious moment, Help me? Help me with what? I began to see there was more going on here than merely an aging admiral muttering about how today’s Service was nothing like the Service of her youth. Admiral Greaves, I began to see, was up to something. And it might involve me. The thought gave me cold shivers; I felt a little ill.

  She went on. “And at the end of all that, Rudyard will get a slap on the wrist for killing those creatures — and an official commendation, the Royal Service Cross, authorized and to be presented by Queen Helen herself, once we get back to civilization.”

  I blinked, thought, Shit! And said, “He’s going to get away with killing them!”

  The admiral leaned on the back of the couch, looking at me. “He will not only get away with it, Mr. Dunne, he will be told ‘Jolly good effort, old man!’”

  I held my head. It was starting to throb. “But I, uh, I don’t think the captain is…”

  Still looking at me, she flashed a wry smile. “You mean, you think he’s a few protons short of a nucleus?”

  “I heard him the night he shot the aliens, ma’am. He wasn’t … he wasn’t himself.”

  “Mr. Dunne, as far as I can tell your captain is quite mad. You get officers like that sometimes, particularly the older ones, who came in before we had decent screening and treatment methods. This poking around out here in the dark, beyond the lights of civilization, can be quite psychologically damaging. It’s the thought that, your crew aside, there isn’t another living being in ten or twenty light-years, over a hundred trillion kilometers. It’s frightening, what isolation can do.”

  “I see,” I said, lying. I had been taught that space travel was boring, like I had told Ferguson my first day aboard ship and that nothing much happened out of the ordinary. Unless I somehow accidentally skipped the Academy lectures about how exploring space could drive you mad.

  The admiral went on, “Your ship is about to get orders to return to Ganymede for a weapons upgrade, and to take on cargo for a special mission.”

  “I still don’t see why you’re telling me this, ma’am.”

  The admiral came and sat on the table, directly facing me. She said, her eyes bright with zealot fire, “The Royal Interstellar Service is corrupt!”

  Wide-eyed, I stared back at her. I didn’t feel like I dared look away. And I wondered if Rudyard was the only crazy officer around here. Remembered, too, what Lily Riordan had told me, that I would need to find allies if I was to survive what was meant to happen to the captain. Well it looked like the captain was going to survive, but I suddenly felt like I might need allies all the more ­urgently. Already I knew I had earned Ferguson’s ire, which was a ticking time-bomb whose blast had yet to come. Now it looked like I had attracted the interest of this admiral, whose conduct was worrying me more with each passing moment.r />
  “How do you mean, exactly?” I asked her.

  She moved to sit next to me. Close enough that I could feel her thighs warm against my white trouser leg. I could smell the coffee on her breath. “That our beloved Service is corrupt, you mean?”

  I swallowed. “Yes, ma’am. Corrupt in what way?”

  She smiled at me. Her teeth were small and white. “Your service record shows you know this already, Mr. Dunne. You know what’s going on, the price you have to pay to get along.”

  I heard Ferguson saying, “Don’t rock the boat!”

  She continued, “You were taken to the Academy ­Infirmary six times in just one semester of your junior year! The cadet disciplinary council reported dozens of instances where you were found in need of their special brand of disciplinary action.”

  More embarrassment. I had no idea such information was attached to my personal records. Yes, I knew all about those bastards at the disciplinary council and their thuggish ideas about correcting wayward cadets. I recalled that most of my so-called offences against the Service cadet code of conduct occurred during my protests against the unbelievably harsh punishments that I was receiving for trivial infractions.

  I realized that the admiral’s hand was resting on my right thigh. It was light but astonishingly hot. She watched me silently, waiting to see what I would do. We both knew she had now moved far beyond the scope of existing regulations and guidelines governing the ­conduct of senior officers towards junior officers. If I let her keep it there, I was committing an offence of my own. I wanted to tell her to move that hand. Wanted to move myself off the couch. But the consequences of offending someone as powerful as an admiral…

  “Ma’am…” My voice was hoarse. I was deeply uncomfortable, and scared. I was starting to see how an un­remarkable but reasonably intelligent junior officer who was likely to be bundled out of the Service when the next round of cutbacks came, might be of use if you were an admiral with a burning desire to cleanse the corruption from the ­Service.

  She leaned closer, and whispered, conspiratorially. “Mr. Dunne, the Service was not always corrupt. The Service I joined would take your captain and pension him off, or put him in a veterans’ treatment program and try to help him deal with his demons. The Service you joined is going to make him a hero and give him his command back.”

  I tried to lean away from her. She was pressed against me. I said, “You said your handpicked officers are going to exonerate the captain. How can—?”

  “Orders have come down from the Admiralty, and in turn from the Lords above them. Captain Rudyard has lucked out. He has been picked for a special mission, largely by doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.”

  “You mean, because of his … incapacity?”

  She shrugged. “Your ship found actual, tangible aliens out here in the dark. And these aliens will save us all, in a suitably perverse fashion. We have a cause!” She was staring deep into my eyes, saying this. She was scary, but at the same time, there was something intoxicating about attention like this, receiving exclusive information. I felt very hot.

  “This cause is going to save the Service, is that what you’re thinking?” I asked nervously.

  She flashed me a big, wide smile. “Precisely! Aliens we can see; aliens we can kill; aliens we can use to justify a halt to downsizing and cutbacks, perhaps even use to justify an expansion. Battleships, Dunne! Dreadnoughts!”

  “But the captain…”

  She made an offhand gesture and kept smiling at me. “Captain Rudyard must go, of course. Probably Ferguson, too, the pig.”

  Something treacherous in me began to think the ­admiral was a striking-looking woman for her age. “This is all very interesting,” I said, my gut roiling, cold with anxiety, tension, excitement, “but—”

  “What does it have to do with the likes of SSO1 Dunne?”

  She moved her right hand, and ran a long, thin finger down the side of my face, brushing the edge of my mouth. She was grinning as I fought to suppress a shiver. “James, I am going to restore the glory of the Service. And I think you want that, too.” The admiral’s face was too close to mine. I could see tiny beads of perspiration on her upper lip.

  “Well, yes,” I said, knowing there was huge trouble ahead, but not really caring. “But—”

  “You want to hit back at every bastard who ever screwed you over and made your life a living hell, don’t you?”

  That hit me where I hurt; she knew my point of vulnerability. Memory-fragments of traumatic nights, of ritual pain giving in the name of group bonding, discipline, and the dissolution of the self. I had forgotten or suppressed a lot of it, but there was some I still remembered, and about which I still had nightmares. I dreaded encountering those men again, because I did not know what I might do. Some of the dread was a fear that I might kill them; most of the dread was that I would do nothing, and let them do it all again. I knew that at the beating, rotten heart of the Royal Interstellar Service, we were bound to each other through transactions of pain and blood. And that it had not always been this way. In the end I decided that if there was a chance that this foul organization could be cleaned up, I would help in whatever capacity I could. Some things were more important than one junior officer’s less than stellar career. It scared the shit out of me thinking about it, but after all that had happened to myself and others like me, it was worth it.

  “Oh yes,” I said, thinking about those memories, about all that buried pain, not really aware that my eyes were looking at her mouth. That, for perverse reasons I can’t explain, I was getting aroused.

  I realized tears were falling from my eyes. She said, holding the side of my face, “Well, you and I, and some trusted others, are going to make things right.”

  “What can I do? I’m just a level nothing tubeworm. I’m not even finished my bridging training.”

  She said, “Listen…” and softly, quietly, kissed me.

  Twelve

  Rudyard got his medal.

  It went just as the admiral predicted, complete with an inquiry that featured screaming, yelling, posturing, and all the rest. For three days it was as if the ship vibrated with the tension of it. But, in the end, Rudyard found himself standing at attention before the board, visibly trembling despite manful efforts to maintain composure, and they told him his command was safe, his competence not in question. But he would rise no further in the ranks; that was the price he would pay for killing creatures about whom we knew so little, other than that they were probably harmless. In expert testimony Grantleigh and Blackmore disagreed on whether or not they were intelligent. For every piece of evidence Grantleigh provided to show they were intelligent, Blackmore countered with evidence to the contrary. The matter was not to be decided then, and it hardly mattered.

  The medal presentation was beautiful, of course, the ceremony held once we returned to civilized space and could access a relayed low-latency feed from one of the queen’s satellite nodes. We were arrayed in the nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in the living ghost of an England that never was. I remember the fall of light, sparkling with dust-motes, through the towering stained glass windows in the apse, the images depicting the torments of the saints, often cited as the original heroes of the Home System Com­munity. The resolution of the rendered environment was awesome; I marveled at the spookiness of the acoustics in the great dome’s whispering gallery, and the miraculously iterated arches everywhere I looked, stretching back to the dark entrance, and the sublime vaulted domes of the ceiling.

  Sheathed in white silk and sapphires, the queen stood at the altar, but somehow had time to talk to each one of us. She had wide-set, violet eyes, soft brown hair, a straight, fine-boned nose, and the palest skin; she shone in the stained light. Her voice was warm but still a little wry, as if secretly amused at all this fuss. She wore a perfume I was never able to identify, and
I suspect was a one of a kind created only for her: striking, pretty, but not sexy. Helen needed no perfume in any case; she was our queen.

  Rudyard, his rumpled, melancholy face transformed into a visage of humble rapture, knelt before the monarch of the Community, bowed his head, and listened to the queen’s measured voice commending him for a job well done “in dangerous, treacherous, challenging circumstances, for making space safe for all humanity.”

  I could have killed him. It was hard to see Rudyard congratulated like this for what he had done. Partly because of the creatures themselves, but mainly because of the pretense: he was being honored as if he had acted out of loyalty and duty — and competence. I knew he had come unhinged, at least for a short time. I was trying to shed the memory of his terrible sobs, begging Ferguson to do the deed for him, and Ferguson refusing. There was nothing heroic in this.

  Yet there was the thought that wouldn’t leave: what if the captain had indeed protected us? Then again, what if he just didn’t like the way they had looked at him?

  I looked around, and saw, among the crew of the Service flagship, Admiral Greaves. She was among the first, once the formalities were complete, to rise to offer Captain Rudyard a standing ovation, and the horns were sounding, and then the heralds announced that Captain Humphrey Douglas Rudyard had achieved the rare distinction of the Royal Service Cross. As we stood and applauded, the QH satellite node was transmitting the construction codes for the physical version of the Royal Service Cross to Eclipse so the captain’s personal fab could build the medal and have it ready by the time we finished the ceremony and emerged from the cloud.

  Admiral Greaves clapped and cheered with abandon, though I saw her sneak a look my way. She did not wink, nod nor otherwise suggest anything was different or significant between us. There was no need. I felt my face burn.

  By now the spyware she had injected into my head was approaching the end of its growth and installation phase. I could feel something going on in there, the new system settling in, calibrating, and configuring. Sometimes I felt a twisting wave of blurring dizziness and had to lean against a wall to avoid falling; other times, I suddenly felt feverish and needed to sit and breathe deeply. I ran diagnostic routines through my existing headware to make sure the new system was interfacing properly, and so far, ­everything was checking out. It wasn’t like I was a kid, and experimenting with cracked game wetware from the Heart of Darkness habitat and places of similar ill-repute, where slipshod attention was paid to the immuno side of the equation and processor cycle transformer problems. Lots of kids got their brains fried trying experimental headgames. Their new brains took about five years coming up to speed and function, but were never the same.