by John Barnes
The infirmary surveillance camera shows red rather than green lights over three doors in the pharmacy racks; they’ve been opened. “Those are the racks for painkillers, mood fixers, energizers, and anti-psychotics,” Wychee says.
“In other words, anything with any recreational potential. And you can’t tell from here if the drugs have been stolen or if someone was just nosing around them?”
“And I don’t feel good about leaving the cockpit; I know Virgo flies itself but—”
“No, you’re right. I’ll go have a look.”
The infirmary is another compartment in this little auxiliary-ship area around the cockpit, so I’m there in seconds. As soon as I open the red-lighted cabinets, I find what we were afraid of: empty racks, and their labels are the names of anything medical that people take for reasons that aren’t medical.
Back in the cockpit, I tell Wychee, “You were right. And it’s got to be Derlock. Where is he right now?”
We check phone locations; Derlock is in the bunk room, following the rules for his “house arrest”; I would guess he’s asleep, since he doesn’t read, or actually consume much entertainment at all. Emerald’s phone is still in the bathroom; probably she’s enjoying a long shower. “All right, then, you call Stack, and ask him to bring Glisters here. We need to do this with all the officers present.”
“What are we going to do, Susan?”
“Whatever we figure out. Which might involve Stack’s muscle for backup. I’ll try to catch Emerald before she leaves the bathroom.”
She is fresh from the showersphere, coverall neat from the Phreshor, and she was probably looking forward to bed until I turned up. “Sheeyeffinit,” Emerald says. “Of course it’s Derlock. And he’s already under house arrest for assault.” Her eyes widen and then narrow as she realizes. “He must have done it while he was standing his watch with me. And I swear I only let him out of my sight so he could go take a leak, but the infirmary is almost as close as the bathroom. Then he probably went and hid the drugs while I had him running errands, because I couldn’t leave the cockpit. That turd. Right under my nose on my watch.” Her jaw works as if she’s chewing something nasty that she can’t spit out. “I don’t suppose you did look up anything about flogging?”
“Unfortunately not.”
“It’s so soon after the last time,” Emerald says. “I mean, that makes it even worse, I guess, but… we aren’t even sure we’ve managed to punish him, yet, for attacking Marioschke in front of all of us. We don’t have very many options, do we?”
“Not many,” I admit. “But we can’t let him play ‘too special to be just one of the crew,’ and he’s got to be shown that no matter how big a brat he acts like, he’s never going to be too big to spank.”
In the cockpit, Emerald brings Glisters, F.B., and Stack up-to-date with quick, brutal accuracy. She summarizes with, “So we’ve got more Derlock trouble, and we can’t leave it alone.”
Stack socks his fist into one hand, the only comment he’s made so far.
Wychee shrugs. “It’s not complicated, just hard. We wake him up and demand the drugs back. Either he gives them up or we search him, and find them. If he’s hidden them somewhere we hit him till he tells us where. If he thinks that’s unfair he can complain after we’re all rescued. Then we give him the shocks that were suspended for his first offense, and sentence him for this one.”
“And the sentence should be?” Emerald asks.
“When you consider what it could be like for one of us to be hurt or sick and having to ‘buy’ those drugs with favors or property, I say it’s much worse than that assault. Just lock him up till we get to Mars and tell him he’s lucky not to get another big round of shocks.”
Emerald glances at Glisters and me; we say “Wychee’s right” in unison.
After a moment, she says, “All right. Except I don’t like him getting out of working for the whole voyage. We’ll make the house arrest run to the end of the trip but we won’t do the full lockup yet.”
“Commander,” I say, “I don’t like ‘yet.’ If we know he’s going to do something else—and we do—let’s just lock him up and not give him the chance to do it.”
She thinks, then shakes her head. “I see your point, but let’s do it my way.” Her voice is flat and neutral. “Okay, let’s do this.”
I notice that as we go into the bunk room, Stack, still not speaking a word, positions himself beside me; looking scared, but not hesitating, F.B. moves to flank Emerald.
Em flips back the faceshade and shines a hand lamp at full power into Derlock’s face. “Where are the drugs you took from the infirmary?”
His face and shoulders tense, then relax as he calms himself. “In storage locker 6 in the farm section near the Forest, floor 6, chamber 6. It just seemed kind of appropriate—”
“Wychee, would you?”
“On my way.”
“I have Wychee’s proxy for whatever we decide to do about you. You’ve already assaulted a crew member and now—”
“I’m just doing what you’re doing. In fact I’m doing less than what you’re doing. You took over the whole ship and everything on it, and all I’ve taken was some resources so I could develop some business and—”
“Any of us could need any of those drugs, if something goes wrong!” Emerald all but screams. “And you want to hold them to make someone trade for them—”
“There’s no better customer than a desperate customer—”
“—or worse yet trade them away to people who take them for fun—”
“—they’re exactly the same people you’re so worried about protecting, why not let the individuals decide whether to use the drugs now or save them for later—”
“—and then when we have somebody with a severe burn or a psychotic breakdown—”
“Oh, sheeyeffinit,” he says, in righteous disgust. “You can’t predict the future, you can’t say for sure that any of those things will happen, and if they don’t, the drugs that could have been fun for everyone here would just go to waste. And just because I’m foresighted enough to take care that you have a place to buy those drugs, and see that they get allocated to the person who wants them most, you want to make it sound like I wouldn’t help a friend in trouble. You grab the whole ship and everything that’s on it, and then you won’t let me just take some things to have a little business of my own, even when I do all the planning and all the work and put in all the effort. Both of us just took what we found and used it for our own advantage, and the only difference between us is I’m not saying it’s for everybody’s good—even though everyone will benefit.”
“It’s a very simple difference,” I explain, styling Pop in some old adventure meed more than ever. “We’re trying to save our lives and get home. You’re a psychotic thug and you just like hurting people—”
“That is—ugh!”
He makes that noise because Stack has grasped Derlock’s hair with one hand and punched him in the face with the other. “No evidence except we all know it,” Stack says, and hits him again. “See, evidence isn’t what this is about”—thud!—“because we’re not doing your old man’s stupid law”—thud!—“we’re doing justice”—thud!—“and justice is about what’s true.”
I reach forward and touch Stack’s elbow. “Stack, we don’t want to be charged with abuse of a prisoner when—”
Derlock makes a disgusted noise. “Right, like you’re going to care about the law when—”
“But I do care,” Stack says, very softly. I don’t know what it’s doing to Derlock but his tone is ice on my spine. “You’re right, Susan. Justice here, but law when we get home. If I didn’t care about what the law is, I’d just keep hitting Derlock. Emerald, Susan, do you have to arrest me or charge me?”
“It’s at our discretion, “I say. “Stopping when I asked you to was good enough for me. Look, Derlock, you can invent n-nillion reasons to act like your usual self, but out here with our lives at stake, none of us care w
hat a big celeb you’re going to be, or what principle you twist around to your own use, or that your father has gotten away with more murders and rapes than half his scummy clients—”
“Don’t you ever—” He starts to sit up and Stack puts him down with a hammerfist to the forehead, then pins his neck to the bunk with one big hand.
“It’s a little late for family honor,” Stack says.
“Derlock,” I say, “who you are, where you come from, and what you’ve done, is screaming so loud we’ll never hear what you say. Do you understand that?”
“You don’t trust me.”
“You’re right. We don’t.”
He shrugs off Stack’s hand, rolls over to face the wall, and pulls his faceshade down, telling us all to go away. When Wychee comes back a few minutes later, saying that all the drugs are back in their rack in the infirmary, the four officers stand around Derlock’s bunk and put him under house arrest until we make our pass by Mars, and declare that for the next offense, we will by god lock him up no matter how much trouble it is to guard him or how unfair it is that he gets out of all work. He pretends to be asleep but we know he hears.
Then we drag him down to the infirmary—sleepsack and all since he won’t come out—and after a certain amount of punching, kicking, and arm twisting that’s probably worse than the punishment itself, we put him facedown naked on an operating table, and, referring to the manual, Stack uses the shockwand to put a dozen big welts on his ass. He’s crying after the third one, it makes me a little sick, and everyone else looks kind of green, but we get it done. Stack looks flat-faced and dead; Emerald volunteers to put the ointment on his butt, and talks to him like she’s his mommy.
By the time we all get to bed or back to our shifts, everyone is way off schedule, and for a day or so the ship functions, but none of us get along. Poor Fwuffy is beside himself with anxiety, because part of his programming is telling him to revere authority and another part is telling him to take care of poor, hurt Derlock. He gets over it after he tries to give Derlock a comforting hug and is rewarded with a kick in the trunk.
I add it to my list of reasons to kill Derlock some day.
13
ULTRA SERIOUS GIRL TALK
May 11, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 150 million kilometers from the sun, 141 million kilometers from Mars, 21 million kilometers from Earth.
A FEW DAYS later, when Glisters and I get up and find our way to the kitchen, there’s a surprise: Wychee has packed a box brunch for her watch and mine to all eat together in the Forest. “I almost feel sorry for Emerald’s watch,” I say, sipping her crab bisque out of a squeezer as I sit on the warm ground cloth beside a glass pool.
“Well, don’t. My special cockpit tiffin is even better, and that’s what they got. Some evening when I feel like staying up I’ll fix one for you and Glisters, or pretty soon Marioschke or F.B. will be able to do it. Sheeyeffinit, we’ve got months; I might teach you both to do a little fancy cooking for yourselves. I’m just glad my job involves making life pleasant for everyone else.”
We look down into the stars wheeling by the windows, up into the trees, and around at the quickly recovering Forest. We eat the warm apple pastries, fresh quiche, hard-crusted bread, and crab bisque; there’s not much to say otherwise, and after a while, Glisters and Stack volunteer to take the dirty containers back to the kitchen, on their way to the ongoing process of figuring out how to install the antenna. Wychee sends Fleeta to the farm with Marioschke again, and heads for the cockpit to take over the conn. I decide that as the concerned, dedicated pilot, devoted second in command, and ranking officer awake, I will go see how everyone is doing.
I had thought F.B. would be with the other two guys in the fabshop, but when they look up from the mostly finished mock antenna, they haven’t seen him. “And that’s strange,” Stack says. “He’s usually right here as soon as his watch is over.”
Glisters nods. “He loves this stuff. Maybe he’s sick or something came up?”
I speak Guyish well enough to know that they’re telling me that they’re worried.
In the cockpit, Wychee looks up to say, “Emerald and Derlock went out of here like two rockets; Em barely did a handover at all, and Derlock was practically tapping his foot while she did. I don’t like that.”
“Me either. Hey, can you check where F.B.’s phone is?”
“Hunh. Corridor outside the bunk room. Maybe he dropped it or something.”
“Could be.” I’ve got an entirely different hunch. “I’ll check.”
F.B. is floating by the bunk room door. He looks exhausted, stupefied, and sad.
“I was going to work with Glisters and Stack,” he says. “But I’m so tired I can’t focus.”
Instinctively, I rub his neck and shoulders; he’s as tight as if he’d been doing high-resistance shrugs on the weight machine. I squeeze and pull at his knotted muscles. “What got you so tired? This feels like you’ve been carrying the weight of the ship, F.B.”
“I was the only one on the screens for almost the whole watch. I’m not good at it like Glisters is, I had to keep looking stuff up and then checking between what I looked up and what the screens were doing, and I was so afraid I would make a mistake and get it wrong—”
“You stood watch all by yourself?”
“Just for the middle seven hours.”
I want to ask him what Emerald and Derlock were doing but he might know, and tell me, and I’m already about to explode. “F.B., if you wanted to go to bed early, why are you out here?”
“I can’t go in,” he says. “Do you think if I ask very politely they’ll give me my sleepsack and I can sleep somewhere out here? Except I don’t really know how to ask politely—”
“God’s nuts on a red-hot skewer, F.B.,” I say, grateful that Pop went through a phase of doing Jacobean drama; sometimes an ordinary oath just won’t do. “That’s not how it works. You are going to sleep in your own bunk now.”
I throw the bunk room door open, turn on the lights, and with the brightest cheeriness I have ever sparkled at a fellow human, I bellow, “Is everything all right in here?”
This literally causes a flap—they both try to flap away from where they were doing a mid-air. Derlock pulls his feet up, pushes off Emerald, and shoots into his sleepsack like a sidewinder down a hole. That tumbles her; she flaps like a drunken condor, trying to pretend she just happened to be naked and flailing across the room into her own sleepsack.
“See, F.B., nothing going on,” I say. “Hope I didn’t wake anyone. Did you need to go down to the bathroom and fresh up before bed?”
“Already did,” he says, and unselfconsciously shucks his coverall. He wipes tears from his face, whispering “Thank you” as he gets into his sleepsack.
“Emerald,” I say, much too sweetly, “I think the commander and the pilot need to have a quick conference. I’ll wait for you in the corridor.”
I close the door before she thinks of anything to say; now she’ll have to come out and talk.
Seconds later, the door opens. Her expression triggers my jiu-jutsu training; I’m flexing my hands and finding my balance as soon as I see her face. Before she opens her mouth I say, “That was amazingly shitty, Emerald. Making F.B. stand your watch for you. Then locking him out of his own damned bed. All so you could have sex with the boy toy—who happens to be the most dangerous major disaster of a problem we’ve got on board. What kind of a commander do you call yourself?”
“You have ultra violated my privacy!”
“What the sheeyeffinit are you thinking, Emerald? If we were on Earth or Mars or anywhere safe of course it wouldn’t matter and it would be all your own affair, and if you weren’t one of the people we count on most here I suppose somebody could look the other way, but this—”
“Shut up!” She really looks like she wants to attack me physically, but maybe she’s remembering how she’s seen me take Derlock down. “I know what he is and I know what he’s like. I’m just ha
ving some fun. In case it hasn’t occurred to you, this being the commander thing is ultra high stress, and sure, he’s using me, but I’m using him and—”
“Emerald, I don’t know what he’s been saying to you, or what he’s been trying to work into your head, but I can kind of guess. As far as the reason for stowing away in the first place is concerned, Mission Accomplished. You have celeb-eenie locked in—”
“Derlock has bigger dreams than that.”
“He sure does,” I say, remembering too much pillow talk. “But, Em, there’s no place for anyone else in Derlock’s big dream. At least no place you want to be in.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’ve already had him—”
I nod. “True. And you’ve just had the only part worth having.” The silence drags on for a second or two. “Aw, sheeyeffinit, Em, be careful, all right? If you have to do this, then the second you’re done, drop him like a live cobra, understand? I’m worried sick about you.”
Something about my expression seems to take the fight out of her. “I can take care of myself.” She opens the bunk room hatch and goes back in.
Later, in the cockpit, I’m braced with my feet on the floor, my back against the slumbering Fwuffy (he seems to like being used as furniture), and my hands free to gesture like a mad conductor. I’m venting to Wychee and Glisters. “I guess saying ‘Commander, you’re being an idiot’ is on the pilot’s list of job responsibilities.”
Glisters grunts. “I went to StarPolish with Derlock before we came to Excellence Shop. So I’ve known him maybe five years. Ten minutes after he met me he had my lunch money in his account and my head in the toilet. But I still went along on this stowaway to Mars deal. He does have a knack—”
“Hey,” Stack says, sticking his head in, “Glisters, are you awake enough to give me some coaching on this antenna issue? I’m trying but I’m noticing that maybe I should’ve started paying attention in school about ten years ago.”
