Eclipse

by K. A. Bedford

  I replayed Trish’s message. After, I booted my suds bucket as hard as I could; it made a deafening racket as it hit the opposite bulkhead. Water sloshed across the black floor, ripples and currents everywhere. I watched it settle into a puddle of gray water. Still not satisfied, I kicked the damn bucket again and, empty this time, it bounced off the bulkhead again, and landed on its side, mouth open, gaping at me. I kicked it again. I was working up a sweat, and starting to really hate the bucket.

  It rolled, at last, badly dented, into the puddle. I slumped against the wall, hands on my knees, exhausted and ­furious. I swore as loud as I could again and again, stalking back and forth across the corridor, eyes squeezed shut, ­determined that I wasn’t going to cry.

  ShipMind chimed in my head, interrupting me. “What now?” I said.

  There was an urgent item on the General Ship News channel: Captain Rudyard was being escorted back to Eclipse by emergency direct boost shuttle. His ETA was 1320 hours. We were instructed to disregard all public news reports, and stand by for a formal Service announcement shortly.

  “What?” I stood there stunned for a while, looking around, scowling, as if by scowling I could frighten the news into making sense. The captain kicked out of the city? Getting in to trouble while on shore leave was like a badge of honor among Service officers of the captain’s generation. And the bigger the trouble, the better they liked it. In any case, the distraction was helpful. Still breathing hard, still full of poisonous anger, I clicked into my news feeds, searched for anything concerning Rudyard, and got a surprising amount of stuff.

  Summary: one Humphrey Rudyard, captain of HMS Eclipse, accused with two other senior Service officers of involvement in the deprivation of liberty and repeated assault of two sex workers employed by the Stellar Regent Hotel over the course of a three-day booze binge. The other two Service officers were the captains of the cruiser Echo, one of Eclipse’s sister ships, and the light destroyer Dauntless. The sex workers concerned were not regular, disposable prostitutes, but high-priced human female ­escorts. They managed to escape from the hotel suite and raise the alarm, and had since filed charges with Winter City police. Service Military Police and attack lawyers swooped in with media gag orders and hoped to have the whole matter handled internally.

  As I read, the feed cut out, replaced by a “technical problems advisory” — across every feed running stories concerning this incident.

  I wanted to laugh, but I hurt too much. So I leaned there, chuckling a little, a gallows laugh, rubbing my aching knees, stretching, rotating my arms and wrists. Thinking about the fine ideals of the Service, the traditions of professionalism, and gentlemanly officer conduct at all times, of being the best of the best, exemplars of all the finer qualities of the modern interstellar citizen. ­Remembering hours of dancing lessons at the Academy, and debating classes, and instruction on formal dinner etiquette, and polite conversation at diplomatic functions, all designed to make us so refined, so charming.

  Ah, but Rudyard and his buddies, his co-accused, came from the older traditions of human space, when things were more colorful, more coarse. When survival at any cost mattered more than making a debating point. Rudyard wore the modern uniform of today’s Service, but he was a man forged in the past. On the other hand, I knew the Service was still turning out men and women who would have fitted in just fine back in Rudyard’s day. Violent hazing, as I knew too well, had never quite gone out of style; it had only gone underground.

  Which made me think about Caroline, and her plan. I knew she was a nasty piece of work, maybe nastier than Rudyard ever could be. But she was my ally now, and I knew that when I was no longer useful, she’d cut me loose and leave me to rot if necessary. Her vision of what the Service should be still called to me, though. She ­believed that hard, bitter, ugly work was needed in order to cut away the corruption in our Service. But power was power: those with a bit would fight to keep it; and those with a lot would do anything to get more. This very attitude justified whatever means were necessary to cleanse the Service, she told me.

  And with the captain back on the ship, I would be able to set the admiral’s plan in motion at last. I planned to keep private, secured records of my own as personal insurance, as well as documentation.

  So much was going on in my head. When I stood still and tried to think, all I could feel was a blinding throbbing that I hoped wasn’t Caroline’s spyware causing infection trouble in my brain. It didn’t help any that I was involved in this business with the captain and the admiral, not to mention Ferguson’s evil head games, tormenting me for getting up his nose, and for knowing things that he didn’t. It occurred to me that maybe I should tell him. Maybe I should call the admiral and find out what the story was between them. I could guess though: it would be something simple, like he tried to get her into bed, she refused, and maybe he went for it anyway. That would be a piggish thing to do. And I sincerely wished I was nowhere near it, uninvolved, just a Level 1, doing my humble job, and not a spy caught up in illegal intrigues.

  Meanwhile, what was I to think about this business with my father off chasing ghosts among the stars? What was he thinking? Had he lost his mind? If this had happened before the Kestrel Event, I would have thought so with no hesitation. But I couldn’t be so certain now. Nothing was certain these days. The universe we knew was gone forever; now the universe had borders; we had neighbors, perhaps several. In a universe of such daunting possibilities, was it also possible that a dead teenage boy could reach out to his father and heal an old wound? I couldn’t say. All I knew was that my father wasn’t the only one suddenly full of huge, angry feelings about Colin, and what he had done to us all.

  At such times I found myself wishing my parents had been able to find the money to have Colin resurrected. The cost of having that done was coming down all the time, making death optional for more and more people. But there was still the other, more important issue: what if they had brought Colin back, restored him to life: would any of us ever feel comfortable around him ever again? Old fears took a long time to fade. And the newsfeeds carried more stories of resurrections gone horribly wrong in one way or another than you’d believe. As for me, I hated that Colin had killed himself; but I would hate having a zombie brother more. He was better off dead. I knew that much.

  And what about Trish, who must be wondering if maybe she was adopted, because she sure didn’t fit our crazy family? Asking my advice! I could have laughed, if I had a laugh in me.

  I went to a vending machine and fabbed a new brush.

  When I got back, I found Ferguson admiring my puddle. His eyes burned cold. He didn’t seem to have a reflection, and I couldn’t help noticing the way his gold buttons — all my hard work with the polish night after night — shone under the lights. I thought my day was now perfect.

  I was wrong.

  “I went to get a new brush, sir,” I said, going through the motions of being polite. My voice sounded flat.

  He was crouching, looking at the puddle and the tipped over bucket. “You should put some goldfish in here, maybe some plants and decorative rocks, perhaps a waterfall, and a little Japanese water feature thingy. What do you think?”

  I screwed up my mouth rather than say what I thought. “You wanted to see me, sir?” I picked up the bucket, got ready to go and fill it up. I would need to fab some sponges, too, and perhaps a mop.

  Ferguson stood, assumed parade rest, and glared at me. “You received the recent ShipMind heads-up message about the captain?”

  “I did, sir.”

  Now the old bastard looked discomfited. “Very good. Mr. Dunne, the captain sent me a private note.”

  “Indeed, sir?”

  Ferguson scowled. I could see perspiration forming on his head. “He asked me to arrange for you to visit him in his quarters at 1500 hours today.”

  I blinked very slowly, and felt my mouth quirk int
o a wry smile. “Whatever you say, sir.”

  Ferguson asked, “Now why do you think the captain would want to speak to a bit of Level 1 baboon shit like you, Mr. Dunne?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir. I am but a humble Level 1, ­after all.”

  I could see he didn’t like my tone, and under other ­circumstances might well have upbraided me about it or maybe even clobbered me again, though perhaps not in a public space. Instead he did his best to incinerate me with his glare, working his jaw. “You will clean up this mess to a level consistent with Basic Spacecraft Hygiene Specifications (Public Compartments and Passageways), and continue your assigned duties until 1500. Is that clear, or would you like me to write that out in big letters with a nice red crayon?”

  “I will try to cope, sir. Will ask for assistance if required, sir. Red crayons perhaps not necessary.”

  Suddenly he was right in my face, an immense Ferguson-shaped monolith. I could feel the heat of his hate in his breath, and feel him trembling in his desire to hit me. “And afterwards, Mr. Dunne, you will report to me directly and disclose the contents of your discussion.”

  I felt my attitude folding. I managed to say, “Yes, sir. Is there anything else, Mr. Ferguson?”

  He looked like he might be thinking something. He stroked his thin moustache a moment, narrowed his eyes. “Why you, Dunne?”

  “Sir?”

  “I don’t see why the captain should confide in you.” Ferguson was trying to conceal his own feelings, but I’m sure I detected a trace of hurt in his tone.

  I lied: “Neither do I, sir.” I had a hunch what might be going on: Rudyard had the aliens on his mind. I’d have bet a year’s pay on it.

  “Oh well,” Ferguson said, still thoughtful, “once you’re finished telling me about the captain, we can move on to discussing Admiral Greaves. What do you think?”

  This was the greater worry, as far as all this was concerned. But I took a breath and shouted, “There’s nothing to tell, sir! Perhaps you should ask the admiral yourself.”

  He yelled, standing close enough to rub noses with me, “If I wanted a suggestion from a piece of stir-fried monkey shit like you, I’d bloody well ask for it!”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, admittedly scared. With the captain back, I suspected Ferguson’s torments would become subtler. I was starting to see that I would have to do something about him — or get a transfer off this damned ship. And then I remembered: Ferguson, as XO, was in charge of clearing transfers, regardless of their having the captain’s approval.

  I swore quietly.

  At last, Ferguson stomped off. He appeared to glow with sick anger, like the most unstable radioactive material known, anger that would give you cancer at twenty paces just from a glance. Perhaps the thing to do with Ferguson wasn’t so much to defeat him at his own game as to find out why he was so angry about things, and especially me. I knew he didn’t like that stunt Sorcha and I pulled that first day, but it was this thing with the admiral that had driven him to a new hostility. What was he worried about?

  Maybe he just hated things not being the way he thought they should be, a supreme control freak. Or maybe there was something else. It was something to think about. I knew now that I couldn’t spend the next three years on this ship with Ferguson poisoning my life.

  I found Rudyard reclining in his Lutio chair when he remoted the door open and let me in to his office. He gestured for me to take a seat. The light was low. I watched him staring at the low ceiling. His eyes were bloodshot, the pupils tiny black dots, as though some evil imp had pricked his eyes with a needle. “Thank you for coming, Mr. Dunne,” he said, voice soft, not looking at me.

  “Captain,” I said, taking his cue and speaking softly, and trying to conceal my anxiety, my own anger. I was thinking too, about that night when he had asked me about the first duty of a Service officer. And now there he was, on the other side of his empty oak desk, looking at me through those pinhole eyes. God, I wished like hell I wasn’t caught up in this. “Are you all right, sir?”

  He smiled thinly. “What would be your point in asking me that, son?” He had to know there were grave questions concerning his command capability, the inquiry result notwithstanding. I wondered where he had hidden his Royal Service Cross; I didn’t see it anywhere.

  “A simple question, sir.”

  He flicked a glance at me, “There are no simple questions.”

  Well, so much for basic human decency, I thought. I sat there. This was his show. He’d lead.

  There was a long silence. He looked at the ceiling. “You believe in God?” he asked.

  Surprised, I babbled, “Probably, maybe not. Hard to say. I used to.”

  “I think about it a lot, just lately. I was brought up ­Anglican, a good boy, like most of us, even before the HSC was dreamed of, when we were just people out here, all trying to get along, more or less, spread far enough apart that we didn’t get into too much trouble.”

  I shifted in my chair. “I was christened Martian ­Reformed Catholic, sir. But I was never a churchgoer.” I knew Dad thought a lot about God, too, and wondered what God would make of those synthetic minds, and what He would make of us for unleashing such things into the universe.

  The captain went on: “Don’t you find the Community a bit on the strange side, Dunne?”

  I said nothing, but I wondered what he was on about.

  “It’s obvious, don’t you think, the whole thing, this whole Community nonsense. The whole bloody thing’s so damn fraudulent, if you ask me. More marketing scam than genuine culture. Bursting with ideals like a week-old corpse bloated with gas.” He wore a strange smile that didn’t seem attached to his face.

  “Sir?” I looked at him, looking for signs of … I wasn’t sure exactly what. Maybe that he would take to me the way he had taken to the aliens.

  “It’s one hundred and forty-three years since we lost Earth. Did you know that, Dunne?”

  “I knew it was a fair while, sir.”

  He slumped, staring off past my shoulder. “We all came from Earth, originally, cast out of our own Eden, as it were. God was quite pissed off at us, I think.” He smiled. I frowned. There was no evidence, that I knew of, suggesting Earth’s death had anything to do with God.

  “We’re a refugee people, all of us, out here in human space. Did you ever think about that?”

  I tried to keep still. Make no sudden moves. “Not as such, sir. I’m from Mars. Fourth-generation Martian-Australian, sir.”

  “You don’t think about the long view, the big picture? Humans cut off from the mother world. And the survivors, the ones smart enough to be offworld at the time, were left to fend for themselves when something wiped out our planet. I can’t believe you don’t think about that.”

  “I’m too busy with work and study and such, sir.”

  I realized that this was as good an opportunity as I would get for my treason in the service of a higher cause. My heart pounding, feeling suddenly very scared, I started up Caroline’s system intrusion spyware and got it running. It threaded through ShipMind, looped out into the station, ran through an anonymous relay system, stripping out links and ID traces relating to me, came back into ShipMind, and homed in on the streams of media feeding into the captain’s headware; it found a suitable carrier wave, and locked onto it. After a moment I got a message indicating carrier acquisition. A moment after that, I saw, laid over my field of vision, the security interface for the captain’s headware, with another status window displaying the system’s progress in digging around the wall, looking for the entry keys.

  I felt my pulse quicken. If I got caught, I’d be in spectacular trouble. It was arguably mad even to try this, knowing the risk. But the captain was unfit — it was ­obvious. The thought that it wasn’t for me to make such judgments never crossed my mind.

  He glanced
at me and smiled. It looked like it pained him. “You need a deeper perspective. You need to think about what kind of creatures we are, we humans.”

  “Isn’t that why we pay philosophers, sir?” A stupid ­remark, too flippant, but I couldn’t help it; the thrill of ­violating the captain’s systems, of sitting here ­conversing with him while at the same time smeaking around in his mind, searching for anything that Caroline might find interesting, or useful — it was intoxicating.

  He ignored my quip. “The humans who survived to populate human space, Mr. Dunne, are the ones who weren’t on Earth when she died. A small number, really, fewer than a million souls in total. There’s a school of thought that says they were the gutsy ones, the ones who had the fire in the belly to get off Earth, to go forth into the universe, to stake a claim on the future no matter what it took, and so on. A romantic view, in essence. There’s another school of thought that holds that space was settled because of greed and political expediency.

  I said, “I’d bet on the latter, sir.”

  “You think so, too, son?” He leaned forward, elbows on his desk. “You and I have a surprising lot in common, don’t you think?”

  I had sometimes thought this might partly be true, but didn’t want to dwell on it. “I wouldn’t know, sir,” I fibbed.

  He smiled at me; I was chilled, looking at him. “Scary thought, don’t you think?”

  I fully agreed but didn’t want to say so. “Sir — did you really feel the creatures in your mind?” I’m not sure where this question came from, or where I got the sheer nerve to just to come out and ask it. And having said it, I felt myself imploding with horror at my impetuosity. “Oh God, sir, Captain Rudyard, I’m sorry….”

  He held up a hand. “Not at all, Mr. Dunne. Fair question. And well, I’m not entirely, completely sure, to tell you the God’s honest truth. Do you know what I mean? I felt something going on in there,” he said, touching his temple, “but I couldn’t say just what. Strange feelings, odd images, a general sense of something other than myself in my own head. A most … unsettling feeling. And I found that as I tried to sort out my thoughts on these occasions, that I would look up at some point, and find myself at the viewing gallery, staring down into that great mass of black slime, and there was a sense that I could almost hear something, just beyond the edge of my perception, a kind of singing.”