by Aaron Bunce
You should have let me toss the place. Then this whole mess would be behind us. You could have locked the tweakers in their rooms and I could have put all the crap I found in an airlock and blown it into space.
He knew what the captain was thinking, or a close enough proximity to it, at least. He was trying to decide whether his missing crew put themselves behind the panel or were placed there, and Fred savored the notion. And if they were placed, who did it and how dangerous were they? The leverage was sliding back his way and Fred wanted to capitalize on that doubt.
“What access panel? Where are they?” Fred asked, looking to the tech.
The young woman shrugged, that gesture making her look far younger and more clueless than she probably realized.
“Bring her in, please, Iliana.”
The young tech nodded and spun for the door.
“What if they are on stims? What if they don’t recognize you or your people? I’ve seen miners dislocate joints or break bones in a stim-rage and not even flinch. That new crap making its rounds around station, that ‘Brain Boiler’ crap, was particularly bad. If that is the one, they will not be rational,” Fred leaned in, whispering. He waited a heartbeat for his questions to sink in, but held his trump card for the very last, for when the captain was busy formulating his response. “Munson was in that room with Nazzar. With you and me. What if he’s sick with whatever was in those sample containers? Even if it isn’t airborne, they could be spreading it through injectors or saliva on inhalers?”
Captain Cordyczk visibly flinched, but never had the chance to respond. The young tech appeared behind him, a middle-aged woman in a white admin jumper following close behind.
Fred’s instincts kicked in, his gaze scanning her quickly from face down. There were no obvious bulges under her stretched and tattered suit, giving no indication of obvious weapons. And strangely, the name and position tapes had been ripped clean off, revealing a hint of pink skin underneath. Her sleeves were intact as well, so he had no way of knowing if she was an injection junky.
He looked up at her face. She was pretty, but had hollow cheeks and darkened, sad eyes. There was a story there, probably not dissimilar to his and the rest of the refugees. She’d lost her job, her home, but what else? A loved one, loved ones? Perhaps everything? This woman wore her grief openly, and part of Fred commended her for it. But beyond that, she also looked the part of a user and that always complicated things. His gaze slid up to her hairline, where a bandage covered most of her forehead. Blood soaked through the gauze just above and between her eyes, and he immediately wondered if it was a souvenir from their exodus off Hyde, or a more recent run in.
“You found a member of my crew?” Captain Cordyczk asked, simply. He didn’t move, or greet the woman either, Fred noted.
“Yes, sir. Um…in the service passage between the lower holds, where you put us. I’m sorry, I don’t know what you call it. I heard them, saw them, behind an access panel in the wall.”
“Did you try to talk to them? Did they need help? Were they alright? What was their condition?”
“I’m sorry, sir. There was a man there. I think he put them there, maybe, or maybe he was just watching them. I only saw it from afar, but to be honest, he scared me. I didn’t want him to see me, so I stayed a ways back. But I saw him. I did.”
Fred’s mind spun, processing the new information, calculating his best verbal and physical responses. Was this a kidnapping? If so, what did the man want? No, that seemed unlikely on a vessel like Atlass. It was more likely that he was a dealer, simply watching over the crew as they got a small taste of his goods. Fred saw enough of their kind on Hyde and Luna. They were a predatory lot. The kind that stuck a person with a dirty injector and then feigned ignorance when they contracted something. Or worse, they showed up on their doorstep days later begging for a bigger fix.
“Do you know him?” he asked, before the captain could chime in.
“Maybe. I’ve seen him around. But I don’t know his name. He’s tall, thin, and was talking to himself. He was just standing in the passage, staring at the missing access panel, counting out loud–the rivets, the bolts, hell the scratches, too. He was counting all of them. That’s all I know.”
Fred’s head snapped around to the captain–one blue eye wide, the other still lidded. But a fear hovered in his gaze that he hadn’t seen before, possibly the same uncertainty that tightened Fred’s chest.
It’s improbable. No, it’s impossible. He was crushed to death, his body vacuum-sealed in a dura bag. He is dead! But…Fred thought, and immediately tried to shake away the thoughts. Why had he immediately gone in that direction? The world was full of tall, thin men, and designer stims could motivate all manner of weird behavior. Just because the woman’s description loosely fit Manis Nazzar, it did not mean that it was him.
“You can lead us to this passage…?” Cordyczk asked. But the woman still didn’t offer her name, she just nodded, giving them those same, dark, sad eyes.
Fred struggled with the urge to move forward and shield her. But from what? He did not know her name and yet there was something about her that affected him–the gaunt face, the bloody bandage. All of it? Was he lonely? Had they interacted before and he simply forgot?
“We’ll go right away. Iliana, take miss…” Cordyczk paused, “out into the passage. Mister Djaron and I will meet you out there in a moment.” The captain studied Fred, watching the two women walk away with a passive side glance. The bridge door whisked shut before he cleared his throat and shifted, aged joints popping from the motion.
“Miss Bishop, you have the duty station. Keep us on course and note the change in the logs.”
The co-pilot popped up from behind a bulky, navigation station, the terminal jutting up from the deck in a mass of clustered, hardened conduit and glowing e-com cables.
“Yes, sir,” she said, then turned back to the terminal. “Atlass D-RADD switch duty lead to Bishop, Sarah–DM two-zero-zero-nine-bravo. Confirm.” The computer chattered loudly, a quiet and monotone voice repeating the command a second later.
“Captain–” Fred said.
“Please follow me, mister Djaron,” he interrupted, quietly. The older man set off back through the bridge, the duty crew working a little too diligently to look busy as he passed. Fred followed him through a small pressure door, past an open doorway to a shower room, and into a small, dark passage.
Cordyczk swiped his wrist against the reader at the end of the hall and entered, the interior lights flickering on slowly. Fred followed, taking in a closet-sized space, dominated by a dark, mahogany desk at its center. It looked strange in the space–highly polished and refined, a piece grown of the old world compared to the room’s smooth composites and painted metal. Plus, he couldn’t fathom how they fit the furniture into the space without tearing it apart and putting it back together again. Or, more comical to fathom, they somehow constructed the Atlass around it.
“We stood outside his quarters…both of us. You heard him talking, shouting, counting out loud,” Fred said, the door whisking shut behind him. “What if he wasn’t dead? What if we sealed him in that bag and he was still…?”
“Still alive?” Cordyczk cut in.
Fred nodded, trying to swallow past an uncharacteristic lump in his throat.
“That is not something I am prepared to lose any sleep over, at this point, mister Djaron. He was a troubled man, one who’s actions put my crew and those refugees at risk. We cannot account for what happened to him. That is unfortunate.”
“Unfortunate?” Fred snorted, “Captain, the man was crushed to death.”
“An isolated incident, thankfully, but Doc Munson called his time of death and I trust his judgment. He also personally supervised the sanitization of that storeroom and his quarters. He assured me the residue on the sample containers showed no sign of contamination or infectious organisms. That was how it was entered on the log, and exactly how it will be presented to corporate when we reach dock.”
“But Doc Munson. Where is he right now?”
“He is on board. Like you said, there may be an unsavory presence on the Atlass, and yes, I will admit that some of my people might have regressed to their old ways,” the captain said, as if trying to interdict Fred’s next argument before he could spit it out. He pushed his way behind the desk and shoved the chair out of the way. Then bent over and started pushing keys on a small wall pad.
“People are wrong all the time, sir. What if the doc was wrong about the infectious nature of whatever was in those vials, just like…I don’t know, Nazzar not actually being dead?”
Cordyczk pressed his palm onto the small screen, a beep and click sounding right after. He swung open a small compartment on the wall, reached inside, and then promptly turned, slapping a pistol onto the desk.
“I thought regulations were clear?” Fred asked, stepping up to the desk.
“He is dead, mister Djaron. Of that I am quite confident.” The captain snugged a duty belt around his waist and slid a pistol into the holster. “I am simply inspecting the contents of our armory. Then together, we will go for a walk down to the Atlass’ belly holds. It is quite simple.”
“Okay,” Fred whispered and slowly slid the pistol off the desk and snugged the holster clip into place in his integrated suit. But he felt far from settled about the whole thing. What if Munson had screwed up and Nazzar had still been alive? The idea of lying broken and bleeding as a vacuum bag slowly compressed down around him sounded like an incomprehensible nightmare. A nightmare he’d helped inflict on someone else. Fred could live with the things he’d done in service to his country, and later for EarthGov, but he didn’t want something like this on his soul.
The captain walked out from behind the desk, and they met at the door, the older man pausing in his stretch to press the open icon. “If that comes out of the holster, I didn’t see it happen. But if it is fired, then this all becomes much more complicated. Clear?”
Fred nodded.
“We are simply going for a walk. To…perform a casual inspection of the Atlass’ emergency pathways and exterior hatches. As a senior officer and a company security professional, if we were to encounter something…questionable, it would be our duty to respond.”
Fred nodded, biting back a retort as the captain opened the door and walked out. Suddenly he was a security professional again, carrying a firearm when procedure evidently denied it.
Funny how justifications change. Even funnier how a blind eye can be turned keen when the scenario changes.
Fred followed Captain Cordyczk out onto the bridge and through the pressure door. The tech, Iliana, and their witness waited beyond the airlock’s outer door, the two women talking quietly. They stopped as soon as the door opened and Fred walked free.
The passages blurred together, blue-striped A deck giving way to green B, yellow C, and then gray D. They piled into a personnel elevator and rode a short, gravity-light ride down past the ship’s insulating water jacket layers. They kept the upper decks shielded from spikes in cosmic radiation, as well as provide additional protection in case material of a more volatile nature was loaded in the holds.
Sad, they’re stuck in steerage like the poor people in those old stories of ocean crossing boats, Fred thought. He’d watched the holo of one particularly bad accident countless times. A story of a massive passenger vessel that hit a big piece of ice. A boat that wasn’t supposed to sink. And yet, it sank.
The elevator chimed, a ring around the doors glowing orange, then yellow, and finally blue as it achieved magnetic lock.
The nameless woman in the torn white admin jumper led them out and to the left, Iliana, and the captain at her heels. There were no people in the passages this time, sleeping or blocking the walking path with their legs, but an abundance of blankets and empty drink and food containers remained. It reminded him of home, specifically the impoverished inner-city streets of downtown Portland.
They approached a massive, oblong doorway, its foot-thick panels frozen half-open in the frame. Iliana followed the woman in without a pause, but Fred stopped just beyond the threshold, the ramshackle passage and the chaos beyond giving him a moment of pause.
From just outside the hold all he could see was nylon ropes stretched from the left wall to tie-off loops on the ground, massive stained cargo tarps draped over them to form privacy barriers. More tent-like structures hung beyond that, half-blocking tension spanners reaching in from the right as well. Crates and topless shipping containers sat amongst it all to form seats or makeshift tables. A layer of greasy haze hung a foot beneath the ceiling, each round spot bulb forming a halo of diffuse light.
His hand trembled for a moment, tapping a cadence against the holster now strapped to his right hip. It looked and smelled familiar, and not in a good way. Like cheap food and bad fuel–tires or plastic, the kind of refuse desperate people burned to stay warm.
Captain Cordyczk stopped just inside the doorway and turned, motioning him inside, first with a nod, then a wave. Fred’s palms were already sweating, and he flicked them against his suit, desperate to shake away the perspiration and his panic.
“They are just refugees. This isn’t Nigeria. There are no young women and children wrapped in bombs waiting in those tents. Don’t be stupid! Man-the-hell up, Djaron!”
With a sniff, Fred strode forward, trying to put a little confidence into his step. It worked, until he passed through the lead-shielded doors and entered the refugee shanty.
He saw faces in the first tent to his left, turned to his right and saw more–dark, sad eyes and reddened noses. They were people, obscured by hats, hoods, and darkness. They were barely ten feet into the hold and the cavernous room’s cold was already biting at his face and hands.
The people were pushing out of their tents, looking at them, moving around to follow them. Fred scanned passively to confirm but fought for composure. They were just people, clutching to blankets, coughing, and sniffling. He heard them murmur–questions perhaps, but not for him. Why was the hold so cold? And why force people to stay in a place devoid of any creature comforts?
The nameless woman led them to the right, left, and then right again, snaking through the makeshift community. Fred felt his stomach tighten as more people appeared, seemingly more rundown and disheveled the deeper they went. A woman came forward, then a man. They pawed at the air before Fred but repelled from the captain.
Why? Were they sick? Was he?
Cordyczk walked stone-faced next to him, his steely blue eyes locked in on their guide. He did not look at the refugees, didn’t greet them or comment on their miserable condition? Did he know things were this bad for them? Could he change it? Did he care?
Fred felt an immediate upswell of anger form in his gut, the muscles in his neck and jaw tightening in response. He’d felt bad for them when they’d first left Hyde, when they were clustered in the passages and storage spaces like cargo, but then the crew moved them down here, where they said they would have more privacy and safety.
The refugees…no, they’re not even refugees anymore. He’s turned them into exiles. Forced into this dark icebox with no ready access to showers or food.
The group grew behind them, more people filtering out from the congested tent city. Fred spotted Hyde jumpers, fleece pullovers, and work suits highlighting multiple colors and seemingly every workgroup from the station. But they weren’t recognizable, not as he remembered them from the busy station. Now they were dirty, tattered wretches huddled together without purpose.
Cordyczk stopped suddenly, his hand hooking Fred’s arm as he very subtly pulled him close.
“There are too many. Do not provoke them. They will rush us if we pull weapons. Do…nothing. Understand? Nothing!” the captain whispered, having to wrench Fred down to his level.
“Provoke them? Look around.” He broke out of the captain’s grasp and turned on the spot. It felt like the whole of the Atlass’ hold was pooling behind them now, pushing in c
loser, their breath fogging the already cloudy air. He felt their palpable need–hunger, cold, and need. And something deeper…something pulling at his own sensibilities.
A woman directly behind Fred moved out of the crowd slowly and put a hand on his shoulder, her tongue flicking as she hummed and intoned wordlessly. The sound buzzed against his ears, forming connections in his brain that he couldn’t immediately appreciate or comprehend.
It was sound and yet not.
“They don’t look threatening to me, captain. Maybe desperate.”
“Get them away from us or we’ll disappear like the others,” the captain grunted, his voice and composure cracking.
“Why would they…?”
Fred never got to finish his thought as the crowd surged in around them–hands pressing, warm bodies bumping, and a mass of shifting feet somehow all lifting and tapping the floor in unison. And there was that humming noise…somehow it made his heart flutter.
“Djaron do something!” Captain Cordyczk snarled, his head bobbing into view before disappearing back into the throng.
Fred fought for a moment, twisting and pushing against the crowd, but they responded immediately. Hands slapped and punched, fingers bunching up into his suit and digging into his flesh. His first instinct was to punch back, to twist and break joints, bite, and gain distance, draw his weapon, and drop the closest person to him. The noise and smoke would shock and stun the others, perhaps giving him another moment to gain space and reevaluate his situation.
Their noise washed over him and, in the moment before his fist swung or his jaw muscle tightened, he paused. Fred felt the others react, the grasping, groping hands relaxing ever so slightly.
Stop, they don’t want to hurt you, he told himself and forced his fist open. Fred’s jaw muscle relaxed, too, the crowd softening against him, their pressure moving him forward like a smooth, gentle wave.
The captain on the other hand, fought and snarled just a few feet away, the crowd snaring his limbs and neck, wrenching him in one direction only to reverse it a moment later. He worried that the man would be torn apart and there was nothing he could do to help.
