“Yeah,” Sikuuku said softly. “No problem.”
Shaw nodded, face thoughtful, slightly confused. “Open bar’ll help.” She pointed a finger to the bar on the far side of the mess hall. “Bad news always goes down better with strong drink.”
“And we ain’t even got that,” Sikuuku snorted. “Best we got is beer. And the beer in here’s about as bad as the food.”
“Still beer,” Shaw told him. “And it’s still free.” She leaned back, tucking one leg under the other, giving him a raised eyebrow look. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the military, it’s that free drinks make just about everyone happy.”
“Beer, though? At six-thirty in the morning?” Sikuuku shuddered, disgusted. “That’s cruel, Shaw.”
Shaw picked up her fork, dragging it through the leftover food on her plate. “No worse than this fakin’ bacon and powdered egg mash they’re eating.”
“Bad food is one thing. Bad beer?” Sikuuku shook his head. “Beer for breakfast with sim practice after is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. Last thing we need is a bunch of pissed off flight crew cleaning puke out of a sim pod.”
“No,” Henricksen agreed, taking another look at the crew. “No sims today. Or tomorrow,” he added on a whim. “It’s the real thing from here on out.” He flicked his eyes to Sikuuku, nodded to Shaw beside him. “Open bar, just as she said.”
Sikuuku frowned uncertainly, shrugged and tapped two fingers to his temple. “Aye, Cap’n. Whatever you say.”
A nod to the two of them and Henricksen abandoned their table, and the mess hall for the empty, echoing hallway outside.
Always quiet this time of the morning. Barely 0630 now, which meant most of the RV-N project’s personnel were still in the mess hall, scarfing down breakfast before their shifts started at 0700. Henricksen passed a few people—late arrivals hurrying to get to the mess hall before the chow line shut down—but mostly he had the corridors to himself.
Enjoyed that after the hustle and bustle, the hurry and worry of the last few weeks. Took his time, savoring it, that unusual feeling of being alone in these moldy old spaces. Ambled his way down that main corridor, taking the first right hand turning. Walked all the way to the end—head down, hands in his pocket—stopping at the last door on the right.
Adaeze’s room. Fisker’s across the hall on the left. Ironic that their rooms were here, in close proximity to one another. Almost as if Kinsey had known they’d end up crewing together when he passed out crew assignments to quarters.
Dead now, Henricksen thought, eyes drifting to Fisker’s door. Both of them dead. Nothing left but a few odds and ends and spare uniforms.
And soon even that would be gone.
A step brought him to Fisker’s door, hand reaching, fingers resting lightly on the oversized wheel jutting from the middle.
Soldiers, he reminded himself. Soldiers serve knowing they could die.
But not in training. No one should ever die in such a senseless manner. Soldiers deserved dignity, and dying during a training run…
“Where’s the honor in that?” Henricksen rasped, voice filled with bitterness, heart heavy with pain. “Where’s the purpose?” He wrapped his fingers around the wheel, gripping it hard, spun it and hit the latch, shoving Fisker’s door wide.
Stepped into a suite as tiny his own quarters. Same layout—front room, bedroom and bathroom off to one side—with the same drab, uncomfortable furnishings because, apparently, whoever designed this particular section of the station didn’t seem to think there was any need to have more than one suite configuration available.
“Probably a good thing,” Henricksen muttered, looking around. “One less thing for people to bitch about.”
Never mind that the enlisted personnel slept in barracks. Half a dozen men and women sharing quarters while the officers enjoyed a private, if somewhat small, suite of rooms.
He stepped inside, leaving the door to Fisker’s quarters open behind him, and turned in circle, looking around.
Not really much to this particular suite of rooms. Nothing on the walls. No trinkets or decorations. Just a hard couch and two straight-backed chairs, the usual desk in the corner with a stack of flight manuals piled atop it.
Nothing at all that screamed Fisker. At a glance, these quarters could’ve been anyone’s. Any officer anywhere, on any ship or station.
Except those binders piled atop the desk. Flight manuals—a whole stack of them, squared off, one laid neatly atop the other.
Henricksen considered them from across the tiny, closet-like room. Walked over and grabbed a binder off the top of the stack, holding it one hand while he paged through it with the other.
Strange, seeing paper. Most people used electronic files, preferring the condensed portability of a reader to a heavy stack of printed out manuals. Suppose that said something about Fisker, though Henricksen wasn’t quite sure what. Files might’ve come with the room, for all he knew. Standard issue along with the hard, uncomfortable furnishings. The grey-on-grey-on-grey walls.
Then again, maybe Fisker brought these with him. Saint-Cyr was Old Earth Academy, after all. With Old Earth ways.
Henricksen paged through the manual, snapping it shut when he reached the end. Set it back atop the pile of others and moved them all to the center of the desk. Rifled the drawers and found another book—this one an old fashioned text on sea creatures, pressed flower bookmark stuck between the pages—and a tiny vial filled with grains of sand, but not all that much else. Stacked those few belongings with the flight manuals on the desktop, leaving them while he searched the bedroom to one side. Pulling down uniforms and plucking up boots, snagging spare nametags and collar devices from the wardrobe, digging through drawers of socks and underwear and other spare items Fisker had squirreled away.
Found a holocube tucked in there, all the way at the back. Powered it on and stared at the flickering pictures of friends and family, a smiling line of uniforms with Fisker at the center, arms wrapped around the shoulders of a man and woman standing to either side.
Powered it off, thinking to add it to the stack of personals on the desktop, hesitated—staring at the cube in his hand—and tucked it inside his uniform jacket, feeling slightly guilty at the theft.
Not right, keeping it—not his, after all. The cube itself wasn’t anything special, just a run-of-the-mill data storage device, the kind you could pick up cheap from any of a thousand stationside electronics dealers. But the images inside it…the pictures of a dead son.
Fisker’s parents would want those. Brothers, sisters, whatever family Fisker left behind.
“I’ll make a copy,” Henricksen promised. “Send them along with the rest of his stuff.”
Which wasn’t all that much. Toiletries and spare uniform items, that book and vial, the flight manuals from the front room. A shiny new medal the Fleet awarded posthumously.
Combat medal, for courage under fire. Fisker, Adaeze, Grunewald, Abboud—they all got one. According to official records, they all died in battle, not on some messed up Black Ops training mission.
Henricksen fished the medal from his pocket, opened the case—leather and gold leaf, a pretty little thing—and stared at the lump of brass inside. Traced the embossed pattern of crossed swords and oak leaves with his finger. The clustered stars of the Fleet’s insignia. The square-edged letters of the Meridian Alliance stamp.
A shiny thing, that medal, and entirely a lie. Better for Fisker’s family, though, thinking his death had meant something. Better for all the crew’s families than having to live with the senselessness of the truth.
Better for the Fleet—that first and foremost, because the Fleet wasn’t about charity. The lie of that medal was far easier for the military than owning up to its mistake.
Henricksen stared at it, hating it. Closed the case up and dropped it in a footlocker with the rest of Fisker’s belongings.
A last pass of the room to make sure he hadn’t missed anything and Henricksen sealed
the footlocker up, and set it outside the door. Crossed the hall to Adaeze’s quarters to repeat the process.
Twenty-Three
Henricksen climbed into Two-Six’s pilot seat feeling surprisingly nervous. Hadn’t felt that way in a long, long time.
Not since he was an ensign piloting his first ship.
“You okay?” Sikuuku pitched his voice low, sensing Henricksen’s discomfort. Using the private channel—helmet to helmet comms—as he squeezed into the Artillery pod behind the Pilot’s station.
“Yeah. Fine,” Henricksen lied, wincing as the pressure suit adjusted. Holding tight to the flight controls as it sucked against his stomach, squeezing like vice grips around the rest of his body. “Just…weird, ya know? After the sims.”
And yet, strangely like the sim pod. Same close quarters. Same blood-red emergency lighting. Same darkly uniformed crew arranged around him, faces hidden behind full head helmets, mirrored visors covering their eyes.
Hanu and Ogawa, Sikuuku on the guns. Crew—his crew, his ship—and those stars outside. The dream of stars he’d been waiting for. A dream of space long denied.
“You ask me, it’s a relief,” Sikuuku said, buckling the straps of the Artillery pod’s seat. “Sims smell like the inside of a goddamn sweat sock.”
Henricksen barked a laugh.
Couldn’t argue with that. Sims had years on them—tens of thousands of flight hours, software swapped out, configurations updated for each new airframe—and yet the base components remained the same. The guts of it used over and over again.
This Raven, though…clean cockpit. Everything brand new. No sweat stink, no recycled air. No musty station odor creeping in from the RV-N project’s spaces. Clean, just…clean. Unspoiled. Theirs and only theirs, not some hot-racked sim shared between a couple of hundred different people.
Felt good, being the first to fly her. Special in a way that made Henricksen all the more nervous. Afraid he’d fuck it up despite all the training. The hours upon hours spent in the sim.
A deep breath to calm himself and settle the butterflies in his stomach, and Henricksen started his pre-flight checks. Flicking switches, confirming configurations and settings, scrolling through endless lists of diagnostics and quality assurance checks.
“’Sides,” Sikuuku said, fiddling with his helmet, setting the comms to the default channel. “Training’s boring. ’Bout time we got down to the real thing.”
“Amen to that,” Ogawa muttered. “Been looking forward to taking this bad boy out for weeks now—”
“’Scuse me?!” Two-Six’s voice cut across the channel, sounding distinctly upset. “I ain’t no ‘bad boy’, sister. I’m an eleventh generation AI badass stealth ship and I’ll thank you to remember that.”
A click as Sikuuku toggled his comms, switching to the private channel again. “Did she just say ‘badass’?”
“And ‘ain’t’.” Henricksen twisted, throwing a look at the gunner behind him. “You didn’t really upload that lexicon we built, did you?”
Sikuuku shrugged, working his way through the Artillery pod’s start-up routines. “Seemed like a good idea at the time. Maybe no one will notice?” he asked hopefully.
“Maybe.” Henricksen faced around, glancing at Hanu to one side, Ogawa on the other.
If they’d noticed Two-Six’s enhancements, they didn’t show it. They just worked away at their stations—heads down, finishing up their pre-flight routines, murmuring back and forth to each other, querying the AI now and then. Everything on the up and up, nothing at all out of the ordinary. Until…
“Are you kidding me?”
Henricksen flicked a last few switches, throwing a sidelong look at Scan. “What’s the problem, Hanu?”
“Salazer, that’s what. Bitch’s been messing with my systems.”
“Me-ow,” Sikuuku said, earning himself a nasty look.
“Not the time,” Henricksen warned, thumping a fist against the gunner’s pod. And to Hanu, “What do you mean? What systems?”
“Language processors. AI’s speaking gibberish. Can’t half understand her. Bad enough Salazar kept resetting the defaults on the Scan system in the sims, now she’s messing with AI language processors?” Hanu shook her head, disgusted. “Huh-uh. That’s bullshit. I’ll kill her,” she said, punching angrily at a button. “I’ll skin that skinny bitch alive if I catch her messing around with my ship again.”
“Salazer. Right.” Henricksen snuck another look at Sikuuku. “I’ll, um, I’ll have a talk with her later. Make sure she—”
“Cut the chit-chat, Captain.” Kinsey, listening in as usual. Sounding slightly annoyed, entirely impatient at the delay. “Finish your pre-flight checks and get that bird out of the hangar.”
“Roger, Control.” Henricksen pressed at the Pilot station’s buttons, running through the launch routine. “Status of the hangar bay?”
“Locked down. All personnel accounted for.”
Lights appeared in the hangar bay’s ceiling—a blood-red line running the circumference of that empty space. They pulsed once as the outer doors opened—massive, triple-thick panel splitting down the middle, the twin sections trundling to either side.
Stars appeared—silver-white and shining, calling to Henricksen from the depths of space.
“Hangar bay is clear,” Kinsey’s voice said. “You may launch when ready, Captain.”
Henricksen shook himself, pulling his eyes from the stars. “Acknowledged.” He locked in the settings on his Pilot’s station, checked the progress of the crew around him. “Primary systems checks complete. We are go in ten.”
“Ten minutes. Launch clock is set.”
A timer appeared in the upper left hand corner of Henricksen’s panel, glowing orange numbers steadily counting down.
“Got it. Stand by for launch.” Henricksen closed the channel, blocking Kinsey out. Toggled comms to an internal setting for privacy—crew only, no nosy station administrators allowed. “You hear that, Two-Six? You ready to party?”
“Scythe,” she answered. Just that, and nothing else.
Henricksen glanced at a camera, blinking in confusion. “Uh, excuse me?”
“It’s Scythe now,” she told him. “Not Two-Six. Two-Six was a prototype. Scythe lives.”
“Okay…” Henricksen was quiet a moment, trying to puzzle that one out. “So, you…named yourself?”
“Duh. Numbers are cute and all, but you can’t expect me to go by Two-Six forever.”
“No,” Henricksen murmured. “I suppose not. And you chose Scythe because…”
“We’re Ravens. Harbingers. Companions to death.”
“And…?”
“A scythe cuts. It’s deadly.” Scythe sounded slightly miffed.
“But you’re a stealth ship,” Henricksen noted.
“Yeah, well. I liked it. And it sounded tough.” Miffed. Definitely miffed.
“Tough. Right,” Henricksen grunted, smiling inside his helmet. “So, have you—”
“Systems are updated. Beacon, registry, everything shows my proper name now.”
“Well, aren’t you efficient?”
“AI,” Scythe said proudly. “Efficient comes with the territory.”
Henricksen laughed aloud.
“You!” Ogawa twisted, pointing a finger at Henricksen. “It was you.”
“Me? What about me?” Henricksen asked, flipping casually at switches, cringing at the defensiveness in his voice.
“You did this,” Ogawa accused.
“No.” Henricksen flicked more switches, checking and rechecking settings he’d already rechecked twice. “Not even sure what you’re talking about.”
“Yeah, you do. The language processors. You messed with them. It wasn’t Salazar at all!”
Henricksen shrugged, maintaining his innocence. Winced as Scythe’s voice cut in.
“Course it wasn’t Salazar,” she sniffed. “Ain’t no way I’m letting anyone who isn’t my crew touch my systems. Especially a second-rate s
can tech like Salazar.”
“Ain’t?” Ogawa folded her arms, helmeted head tilting. “She said ‘ain’t’, Captain. Only you and Sikuuku—” She broke off, visored face turning toward the gunner sitting in the Artillery pod. “You,” she breathed, voice dripping with accusation. “The two of you did this. Together.”
“Me?” Sikuuku leaned out of his pod, pointing a finger at his chest. “Why would I—”
“Oh, yeah. You were in on it alright.” Ogawa harrumphed loudly, turning her back on the gunner as she finished her station prep. “Messed up our AI’s language centers,” she muttered. “Talks like a pirate now. What kind of ship does that?”
“Oh, stop grousing,” Sikuuku told her. “At least she has personality.”
“Damn straight,” Scythe chimed in.
“See?”
“Your personality,” Ogawa shot back. “You ruined her—”
“Ruined?! What are you talkin’ about? She’s perfect! Couldn’t be—”
“Lock it down! The both of you!” Henricksen snapped. “We’ve got five minutes to launch and the last thing I need is my crew arguing about our AI’s new language routines.”
“Thank you, Henricksen,” Scythe said primly, AI voice filling the silence that followed. “I quite like the new me,” she added, sounding supremely smug.
Ogawa glanced up, clearly sulking, stabbing at the panels in front of her. “I’m making some changes when we get back,” she warned the crew in general. “Fix some of the bad habits those two taught her.” A waggle of one finger, including Henricksen and Sikuuku, both.
“Fine. Whatever,” Henricksen said to appease her. “Just finish those start-up routines.”
Ogawa muttered something under her breath, fingers tapping angrily at Engineering’s panels. Powered main propulsion into an active state and examined the data before giving Henricksen the all-clear. “Engines are ready, Captain. Jump drives on standby.”
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