by Aaron Bunce
“Give me a fucking break,” Jacoby groused, before silently throwing every curse word he knew into his thoughts. The idea of talking to Erik didn’t scare him. But he knew what it was like to be a victim of a horrible situation, and like when he was a kid, Erik had no way to control or escape, if the need arose. And he silently wondered if Poole was right about Shane. Had he simply been a mechanism put in place by the company, one presenting opposition to Janice, but there merely to make them feel safe?
“Because horrible alien, flesh creatures isn’t bad enough, I needed to doubt everything else in my life. Thanks,” Jacoby whispered, and after a few moments of frustrating silence, snapped his fingers.
Nothing.
“Okay.” He then proceeded to wave his arms above his head and jump around. Jacoby gesticulated in every manner he could think of for several long moments, even mumbling a quiet song as he fell into an awkward, pseudo jumping jack-like movement. He froze at the end, holding his arms in a wide “ta-da”, yet the corridor remained dark and quiet.
“Come on!” he hissed but couldn’t feel Poole in his mind–no pressure, no voice…just nothing.
Fine, I don’t need you. It’ll probably go smoother with just me, anyways.
Slapping his thigh in frustration, Jacoby pushed forward and jabbed a finger at the battery room door open icon. It beeped three times but did not open. He pushed the button again, but it still refused to open. Jacoby leaned in and let his ear hover just over the dark metal. People were definitely inside. He could hear them talking, their voices muted and tinny.
“Hello?” he called and banged his fist on the metal, “the door won’t open. It’s Jacoby. Can you hear me?”
The voices abruptly went quiet, and he hung there for a moment, his breathing the only discernable sound. Then the thrum-thrum of his beating heart started to echo in his ears.
What are they…? he started to think just as the door clunked and slid open a half foot. It clunked–no motor or servos. Why had they disconnected it from power?
Jacoby peered inside, immediately taking in a sliver of the long room, sleek, shiny foil wrapped batteries filling a rack on the far side. Glowing conduit snaked out of the enclosures, worming up the walls before disappearing into the ceiling.
A face slid sideways, blocking his view inside. Jacoby could only really see a sweaty, wide forehead and a single, brown eye.
“Yeah? Uh, what’s up? What do you want?”
All of Jacoby’s pre-scripted greetings went up in smoke, blown away by the surprisingly hostile tenor of the man’s voice. He couldn’t immediately tell if it was Shane or Erik. Was that strange? What was he missing?
“I. Well…” Jacoby stammered and shifted his feet.
“Can it wait until later? We’re kind of busy right now.”
Busy. Wait until later? Busy with what? Jacoby tried to make sense of the situation, all the while his old, passive nature continually tried to pop up in the back of his mind. It told him to turn and walk away. That it wasn’t any of his business.
The door started to slide shut right in front of his face, but his new nature flared in and took over. He stuck out a hand and caught it before it could close all the way. The door smashed his hand against the frame, but it was more a pinch than anything. After being skewered clean through by alien bone weapons, it kind of skewed his pain threshold.
Someone grunted from the other room, pushing on the door to slide it closed.
“Get your hand out…of there. What’s wrong with you?”
An electric tingle blossomed in Jacoby’s shoulder and fired down his arm and into his hand. He wrapped his fingers around the door and with one arm, pulled it fully open.
“What in the shit?” a man cursed and fell away from him, tumbling onto his rear.
Erik jumped to his feet as Jacoby wedged his body through the narrow portal and into the small battery room. He straightened his jumpsuit as the young technician balled up his fists.
“You could have…” Erik growled, and took a threatening step forward, “hurt someone.” The technician seemed to think better of his proximity, glanced down at his fists, and backed away.
Erik slid back next to Shane, the two men now perched towards the back half of the small space, their bodies half concealed by shadows.
“Sorry about that,” Jacoby said, “I just want to talk to Sha…well, all of you actually.”
Despite all his newfound strength and power, his voice still sounded thin and insecure in his ears, like the old Jacoby. Rife with weakness, perpetually being crushed underneath someone else’s presence.
Suck it up. You don’t need Anna to tell you what to say. Be smart. And you don’t need Poole to artificially boost anything. You can do this on your own. Do what a good leader does–talk to his people and understand what they need.
“Do you realize that you could have broken that door? Or like…really hurt someone?” Erik asked, his eyes hovering behind him. His gaze darted up to Jacoby’s face for only a moment, before dropping to the ground again.
He’s terrified of me. Put him at ease. Let him know it will be okay.
“Yeah, I didn’t mean to do that. I guess I just kind of forget my own strength sometimes. Don’t worry, I’ll bet Anna can fix it up really quick. She got a crash course in powered doors back on Hyde.” He scanned from Erik’s face to the others, quickly trying to read their demeanors. Poole shifted in his brain, that horrible, almost slimy pressure sliding where it didn’t belong. But it was just that, a subtle reminder that he…or it, was there. Nothing else.
I can do this on my own, he thought. He just needed to make them feel safe. Make them understand that what had happened to him, and the others, was real and not something they needed to fear.
“I was just talking to the others up in the galley,” he started, turning to Shane. The big man shifted, twitching under his sudden scrutiny. “Emiko, Anna, and I. They think that what we need is structure. To organize us like a crew, so we can stay on top of maintenance, cleaning, and organizational stuff around the Betty. Would probably help keep us all from going stir crazy, too, I would think.”
Shane nodded subtly, but he wasn’t sure if it was an agreement or simply a confirmation that he heard him. Jacoby wasn’t getting anything from Poole–in inferences, or hormonal feedback. He didn’t like how it made him feel. Like he had no sense of smell, or worse, like he was blinded, too.
Jacoby looked from Shane to Lana, who clutched a large data point against her chest. She seemed to contract under his gaze, as if trying to hide even more of her body behind the polycarbonate device.
This is about as awkward as it gets.
“Emiko’s idea was that we would elect someone as a captain of sorts. Someone to keep people on task and settle disputes. That kind of stuff.” He looked back to Shane, and then to Erik. Both men tensed, the muscles and veins in the younger man’s neck popping out as he swallowed.
Jacoby smiled and tried to laugh off some of the tension. He lifted his hands and rubbed them before him, doing everything he could think of to come off as non-threatening.
“She told me that they thought it should be me,” he continued, and was immediately aware of Shane’s change. The big man stirred, air moving through his nostrils, down his trachea and into his lungs. Then his lips moved, all in fractional time, as if he were preparing to speak. But Jacoby had already decided his next move and beat him to it. In reality, he’d decided on his path in the corridor outside, but his awkward entry made that feel like ages ago.
“No! No! What makes you think we’d let you…” Erik started to say, before Jacoby could speak.
“I think it should be you, Shane,” Jacoby said, interrupting the younger man. He watched Erik “I mean, you probably have the most experience leading people out of the whole group. Your crews always crushed the other ones in production contests. And you were probably the most organized. It just makes sense to me. It’s just until we get to Titan and can get a warning out. Until we ca
n call for help. I guess it makes sense to readdress things then.”
Movement keyed Jacoby to shift his attention to Lana. She’d moved forward, too, responded to something he’d said. But again, Poole didn’t provide any clues. He was on his own to figure things out. That was fine.
The bald man abruptly stopped, his eyes narrowing. He looked to Erik and Lana, and then slowly back to Jacoby. What had they been talking about? And why had they felt the need to lock themselves into the battery room to discuss it?
“That makes sense,” Shane said after clearing his throat.
Jacoby nodded and smiled, trying to present himself as not only a non-threatening presence, but a calming one, as well.
“We’ve got technicians, a nurse, a bonafide soldier, and Soraya, who is probably smart enough to figure anything out in no time. I’m not much help when it comes to computers, but I can turn a wrench or push a broom. If you need something done, just let me know and I’ll give it a go. I figure if we all work together, we can keep this little tug running smoothly. Plus, I don’t know about you, but my sleep schedule has been totally messed up.”
Shane laughed and for the first time since Jacoby had pushed his way into the room, seemed to visibly relax.
It’s working. Keep it up. Just be yourself.
“I know what you mean. I think we were all so preoccupied with just getting off Hyde alive, we didn’t really put much thought into what we’d do once we did. Kind of just all wandering around now, like kids with nothing to do.”
“Nothing to do?” Erik asked, if anything his voice even more strained than before. Jacoby watched the veins in his neck, some deeper part of his brain tracing the branching tributaries up the young man’s neck to his brain. “I’ll tell you what we should be…”
“Erik. That’s enough,” Shane snapped and turned right back to Jacoby. “This…this is smart. I’m kicking myself for not thinking of it on my own. It’ll help all of us to find a little structure, maybe we’ll find a sense of security as well.” He looked at Erik as he finished, drawing out the last word.
The young technician promptly bit off his words and recoiled, his arms flinching at his sides. He was starting to perspire, beads of sweat standing out on his forehead and his armpits darkened with damp.
He looks like a mess. Maybe he should have Emiko take a look at him? Jacoby thought, watching the young man’s eyes dart from side to side without focusing on any one thing. Erik tapped his foot, his right hand absently digging at his exposed left forearm, as if he were trying to pick or pull something off. The young man sputtered for several moments, breathing, and starting to talk, but Lana moved forward and cut him off.
“Jacoby, there is something I think you need to know,” she said.
“Lana, wait…” Shane growled, and lifted a palm to stop her but Erik erupted, his strained voice overriding everyone else.
“What? No! Don’t tell him. You can’t tell him. Or them. He’ll tell her and she’ll just try to hide it. No. No!”
Jacoby took a step back and raised a fist defensively. Shane and Lana backed away, too, the obvious and palpable stress tying them together practically painting an invisible roadmap in the air. He didn’t need Poole to interpret at this point.
“Erik. You need to calm down. No one is out to get you here. We are all safe now. Just take a step back and breathe,” Shane said. “Jacoby is right. We’re all a crew now. We all survived. And if we want to help that continue, then we need to start trusting one another.”
“You’ve got no fucking idea about what you’re talking about, man. Calm down? Trust one another? Shit. I mean, wow. I thought you were smarter than that. It’s the people everyone tells you to trust that end up stabbing you in the back. I’ve lived that shit,” Erik laughed, the sound far too acidic to carry any humor.
Shane and Lana glanced at each other, then looked back to Jacoby.
“He needs to know…someone needs to know. If there is something going on, then we need to figure it out sooner rather than later,” Lana said, quietly, after another uncomfortable silence.
“Know what? Sooner rather than later, what does that mean?” Jacoby asked, and studied Lana’s face, despite her unwillingness to meet his eyes. It sounded like something was wrong, perhaps with the ship, or a member of the crew, and they had known about it for some time.
“Just go ahead and tell him,” Shane said. Erik immediately stomped his foot, a crimson heat blossoming on his cheeks.
“Erik asked something after only a day or so out from the station. I tried to explain the obvious, not that he didn’t already know, about stellar distances changing based off the orbital period, and sometimes what is usually closer is actually further away. I kept thinking about his question afterwards, but didn’t know why. Have you ever had that happen? Someone says something to you or around you and part of your brain catches it. You don’t know why it is weird or important, but it continues to burn in the back of your mind?” Lana spoke so quickly Jacoby struggled to catch everything. She had a strange method of breathing while talking, which made it even more difficult.
“He’s not going to…” Erik started, but Lana spoke over him.
“It was the second night, like oh one hundred dark and his question was back in my head. I kept wondering, ‘why Titan’? Yes, Saturn might have been on the intercept-friendly side of its orbit, but that was still a big jump from Hyde. So why Titan? Why now? Why Titan?”
“Because that’s the closest facility with FTL coms. That is what Anna said? I mean, she ran all the calculations,” Jacoby said, recalling that moment on the bridge.
“But that is a Russian Federation facility. How would she know that it has FTL coms? How would she know about it at all, considering Planitex only tracks and stores coordinates to select corporate or EarthGov Systems facilities? The Russian Federation and EarthGov Systems have been waging a data war for almost a decade. They call it Cold War two point-oh. I tried to bring it up to Anna the next day, just slide it in subtly during casual conversation between friends, but she spaced off on me. Then just up and walked off.”
Jacoby listened but couldn’t deny a rising sense of unease–his anger and betrayal at Anna’s sense of distance. Her strange tendency to pull into herself and shut down. It hadn’t just been him, but why? Was there something she was trying to hide from them?
“I can’t imagine Anna would just lie to us. I’ve known her a long time. She’s probably the most honest person I know.”
“I know. I know,” Lana said, finally meeting his eyes. She nodded, tapping the large data point against her chest repeatedly. It felt like she was trying to convince herself, more than him.
“Go on, Lana. Just tell him,” Shane said. Jacoby noticed Erik’s eyes then, the technician’s face locked somewhere between panic and rage. Lana nodded, took a deep breath, and continued.
“When everyone was sleeping, I pulled the transit log and cloned it to this data point. It took me almost a full day to translate what it meant. I mean, I know most coding languages, but routing script has always been a struggle for me. It was all there, not just the data for Titan, but all the routes she simulated. Titan wasn’t the closest destination. There were, I counted, at least two closer. I argued it away, that maybe the two closer ones weren’t ideal, but they both housed decent sized corporate facilities and were in manageable travel windows. So, I dug deeper into the data, and here is where it gets weird…”
“It only then got weird,” Jacoby laughed quietly, but refrained to let her continue. The questions piled up faster than he could count but hoped there would be something to make it all make sense.
“There was no data in the Betty’s computer about the facility on Titan. None. It doesn’t exist.”
“What? That can’t be right. Then how was it Anna was able to locate it and formulate a course?”
“That’s just it. That’s even weirder. Everything she used for routing was manually inputted during calculations. It’s like she already knew abo
ut it or was pulling the information from somewhere other than the Betty’s logics computer.”
“Five pulses,” Jacoby murmured.
“What was that?” Lana asked, taking a step closer.
“Our last acceleration burn was five pulses and they felt heavier than those before them. I mean, they hurt a lot. I tried to ask Anna about them but she…” He drifted off, suddenly sticking on what Anna had said when he woke up in the shower. She’d said that the partitions in her brain had pulled in data from the systems on Hyde, that it was filling her brain and she didn’t want it. Then she’d gone strangely distant again. Was that where she’d learned about the facility on Titan? What did that mean?
“I checked on that, too, because I didn’t understand why we are still under such a hard acceleration schedule. I know we’re trying to get a warning out, but we’re pushing this pulse engine to its theoretical design limits. Forty-two G’s, Jacoby. That’s what you withstood this last time. For a normal person outside the acceleration chamber over that length of burn, it would have been…should have been fatal.”
Jacoby looked from Lana to Shane, and then to Erik, who promptly glanced away. He turned back to Lana, the pain from their last ignition pulse still fresh in his mind–the fire in his ribs and joints, the ache in his head. Not to mention how every one of his organs tried to smash into one. Lana had commented about it when he let them out of the acceleration chamber. She’d been rubbing her sternum–which was exactly where his problems started.
Had she already had these doubts? Why didn’t she say anything sooner? None of it made any sense.
“So, what do we do?” he asked, turning to Shane.
The bald man let out a sigh and rubbed his face. “Does how I answer hinge on whether I accept this captain gig? Cause it sounds like my life would be a whole lot easier if I just say no.”
