Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  Her surrogate father paused a little too long before he answered. He sounded overly smooth. “Nothing, really. We just picked up a few Unity ships gathering within striking distance of the Anvil. It’s probably just an exercise, but out of an abundance of caution, we’re getting ready, in case they somehow picked up on the Regal disaster.”

  “Do they have enough ships to engage us?”

  “No, but they don’t need to. All they need to do is push us a little, make us move before we find a way to replace our lost fuel, and we’ll be in a world of hurt. The Regal represented about eighty percent of the tritium in the fleet. We’d run out of fuel really fast if we ended up in a fight.”

  Jo nodded to herself, her mind already engaging the problem. “Bastards! Sometimes I wish they’d just come and finish us off. It’s not like they don’t know we’re here.”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah, me, too. Then at least we could bloody their nose. I think that CEO Randal finds it more to his advantage to have us under his thumb rather than gone.”

  Jack paused for a moment, his expression showing that he was thinking about the problem. Then he shrugged a little and looked back at Jo. “So why did you call?” He used an off-hand tone that Jo recognized as asking her to get to the point.

  Now that the moment arrived, Jo found herself questioning the importance of the call. Doctors lose patients all the time, she thought. It’s not a big deal. She shrugged. “Nothing, Jack. I just hadn’t talked with you in a while, and I finally got off shift and thought I would catch up.”

  As soon as she said it, Jo knew that it was a totally lame story. Jack was smart, and that meant that he knew she had just been treating patients from the disaster. It wasn’t any ordinary shift, and she never called, but he didn’t push the point.

  “Ah, well, in that case, I really do need to get going. I’ll get in touch soon.”

  “Sure thing. I’ll talk to you later.” Jo smiled as she disconnected her heads-up and took the device off. She leaned back and blinked hard. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and realized she felt more alone than before she called.

  A cavernous one hundred and thirty-two meters of empty space spread out below Jo, hungry, patient, and waiting for her to make a mistake. Jo climbed to forget. It was the only thing she had found to do on the godforsaken fleet that let her pass beyond her frustration and aching loneliness. The more dangerous the climb, the more she forgot. In her two years aboard the Gallant, she had only watched three people die. Yesterday, watching a man slowly drown in his own bodily fluids had been excruciating.

  Desperate to avoid reliving that again, Jo wedged her left foot into the gap between two giant cooling pipes that fed the ship’s power plant. She pulled the opposite foot up to the access joint far to the right, giving both feet contact with the face. Leaning back over the void, Jo reached blindly behind her to find the weld that was her next hold. This was the most toe-curling moment of the whole ascent. In a few seconds, she would carefully loosen both feet, gently swinging free.

  Jo looked up at her only friend, Amanda, who was busy working her way around a bend and completely unaware of Jo.

  Using the heads-up device, Jo sent a thought to turn off her anti-gravity safety belt. The computer squawked its protest, letting her know that she wasn’t likely to be able to reactivate the device before she hit the floor below at a deadly speed. Jo overrode the protest and glanced back at Amanda. She hadn’t noticed the computer’s mewling.

  Jo held her breath and pulled as hard as she could with her weaker left arm, gently letting her feet swing free as she did so. Reaching forward with her right hand, Jo sought out the large nut she needed to grab in order to carry her momentum upward. For a second, Jo dangled over the void, held up by three fingers. For a fraction of that second, she wasn’t sure that she would find the hold, and for a piece of that fraction, she wasn’t sure that she cared.

  Later, Jo sat with her arms wrapped around her knees on a small platform left over from the ship’s construction and reachable only by the climb. Not only did the platform have a view of the main engine room, it also had a small porthole that looked out on the Anvil, the thick star cluster where the hidden Ghost Fleet lay. Jo sat staring into the void.

  Amanda sat next to her. She was a floor nurse and six years older than Jo.

  “You show the other doctors up, Jo.”

  Jo sighed. Her shoulders slumped. “I’m just doing my job.”

  Amanda opened her mouth to speak and shut it again. Her forehead wrinkled. She looked away from Jo, joining her in watching over the deep, cold dark. “Yes, you are, and everyone knows that you’re really good at it, but it’s the way that you do your job. Did you have to report Rollins for her screwup with the patient’s meds? Was it your job to correct Abrams’s procedure when the senior flight surgeon was right in the room? You might not like it, Jo, but it’s the truth—you are a nineteen-year-old upstart who’s only been doctoring for a few months, and you keep showing up those who’ve been doing it for a decade or more.”

  Jo’s chest tightened. This wasn’t the first time she and Amanda had discussed her interactions with the other staff. “What am I supposed to do? Quit doing my best?”

  Amanda leaned back on her elbows and shrugged. “I guess that would be one solution. The other is to just understand the tension you bring to the team. Maybe you could try going to them privately instead?”

  Even with Amanda’s gentle criticism, Jo’s face flushed. She wanted to defend herself, to argue, but there wasn’t really a point. Instead, she mumbled, “Well, I wasn’t trying to show Evans up. He could have told me why.”

  Her friend continued. “So you got a write-up from Evans. It’s not the end of the world.”

  Jo looked up at the ceiling above her and rubbed the back of her neck, her voice louder than she intended. “But that wasn’t…” She wanted to say fair but caught herself. It seemed childish. “That wasn’t right. He never told me that the stasis chambers had all been filled. If he had just said that my patient was too far gone, that he would have taken too much time in stasis…”

  Amanda shook her head. “He shouldn’t have to. It was an order. You’re a soldier and an internist. You follow orders.”

  Jo shifted uncomfortably, still annoyed. “Yeah, but unlike the rest of you, I didn’t sign up to join this slowly unfolding fiasco. I wasn’t given a choice.” Her tone sounded harsh, even to her ears.

  Amanda grunted her understanding. “How did you end up becoming a doctor, again?”

  Jo shrugged. “It’s the only serious academic course offered in the fleet. There really wasn’t another option for me.”

  “So astrophysics wasn’t good enough for you?”

  Jo closed her eyes and leaned back against the bulkhead. “When your brother is studying at Rhinegau, it doesn’t seem like a good idea to follow in his footsteps.”

  “You miss him?”

  “Yeah. I miss him. He’s the only family I’ve got.”

  “Isn’t your dad some kind of admiral?”

  Jo shook her head. “Jack’s not my dad. My dad and my mom and my two brothers were murdered by the Unity when I was four.” For Jo this was mere statement of fact, and sometimes she forgot the reaction it engendered in others.

  “Oh, Jo, I’m sorry.”

  Jo shrugged, keeping her eyes closed. “It was a long time ago. I don’t think about it anymore.”

  “And with a word, the mystery unravels.”

  Jo leaned forward and opened one eye. “What?”

  Amanda smirked at Jo, arms crossed. “You make sense to me now. You can’t relax, and you run people over without understanding that you do it.”

  Jo knew that she didn’t get along well with the other people in the fleet, but Amanda seemed determined to needle her about it. Her stomach tightened, but she really didn’t want to piss off her only friend. She was lonely enough as it was, so she tried not to sound too irritated and for once pulled it off. She smirked. “Okay, that’
s enough, Amanda. I didn’t hire you to be my counselor.” She hoped a gentle course correction would be enough to get Amanda to leave it alone.

  Amanda didn’t answer Jo’s outburst. Instead she sat there unmoving with a small grin playing at the corners of her lips. After a beat or two she stood up as if nothing had happened. “If it goes on much longer, this fleet will tear itself apart. Six years of running away from the Unity. I thought we were supposed to take the war to them. Start a rebellion and bring hope to the galaxy.”

  Still mildly annoyed but grateful for the change in topic, Jo nodded her agreement. “Yeah, well it turns out starting a rebellion when the Unity has control of the whole galaxy is harder than it looks.” She squeezed her knees more tightly to her chest. “I heard it was faulty maintenance that did in the Regal.”

  The two women fell silent. Jo turned her head back to the porthole next her.

  There was a depth to the void in the Anvil, a depth not found in the deep dark of elsewhere. In the Anvil, stars lay so close together that the distances between them became almost perceptible. At their current position near the center of the cluster, eight hundred and sixty-seven stars lay within a parsec of the fleet. There were just over forty-five thousand stars in total in the whole of the cluster.

  Eventually, Amanda spoke. “How’re you doing with losing your patient yesterday?”

  Jo’s anger rose up. She wanted to yell at her friend for meddling again, but after the feeling passed, she decided she was grateful. “I don’t know, Mandi. I’m not…” She stopped, unwilling to face the tsunami of emotion. It wasn’t just the patient—it was everything. Does everyone die alone, with a stranger holding their hand? She ended with a half-hearted shrug. “I don’t know.” Jo went back to looking outside.

  In the Anvil, the crowding of too many stars into such a small space created a kind of stellar insanity, a continuous dance of hot plasma and radiation. One discontented star could erupt and send shivers through the whole. All that energy made it a perfect place to hide a fleet. It also made it the perfect place to destroy a fleet. Life in the Anvil was an alien import, ephemeral and tenuous. It could not take root in the light and fury.

  Amanda spoke quietly and put a hand on her shoulder. “You get used to losing patients. I don’t know if it’s good, but it’s true. Most of us went through what you’re going through back before the Ghost Fleet ran, back when we thought we could win. It’s hard.”

  Suddenly unable to speak, Jo just nodded. After collecting herself, she cleared her throat. “I’m tired, Mandi. I’m worn down to a nub.”

  Amanda spoke with biting irony. “You can always leave.”

  Jo laughed without mirth. “Yeah, right, and have my memory wiped back to the time I was fourteen. I’d lose all my medical training and all my education. No. I won’t do it. I’ll find a better way.”

  Amanda broke Jo’s dour reverie by giving her shoulder a gentle push. “If you find it, let me know.”

  Everyone in the Ghost Fleet knew that thinking too long only led to a dark place. Those who survived didn’t dwell long in their heads; they kept moving. It was time to go.

  Amanda turned and, reaching out, pulled Jo up.

  Jo joined her at the edge of the platform and looked down, savoring the rush.

  Flipping her heads-up down over her eye, Amanda put her back to empty space. The lights on her active anti-gravity belt shifted from red to green, declaring its readiness for any accidental falls. “Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s true…”

  Jo looked puzzled.

  “About the Regal. Discipline’s getting lax. Something’s going to have to change, or there will be real trouble. On the other hand”—she grinned—“in any other fleet, you couldn’t do this.”

  Falling backward, she plummeted into the void. Careening blindly to the ground, she looked up at Josephine, grinning ear to ear, trusting the belt to catch her at the last moment.

  At the end of their afternoon adventure, the two women clambered back toward the civilized parts of the Gallant through dark, unused corridors. Jo had to go on shift that evening, and she wanted to grab a nap before she started a twelve.

  Scrambling over machinery and around huge pipes, Jo found herself replaying Amanda’s words. Finally, she spoke. “You’re right, you know. I should have talked to Rollins. That was a mistake. Abrams, on the other hand…”

  “He’s a sexist dick, but he…”

  Amanda stopped talking as the hull resonated with a metallic squeal and crunch. Josephine, who had been climbing over a giant pressure release valve, looked up. For just the briefest of seconds, an ominous hiss followed the bang, and then it stopped.

  Instinctively, Amanda crouched down behind one of the many nameless pieces of machinery that kept this wonder floating in the void. “What the hell was that?” she whispered.

  Jo shrugged and whispered back, “Meteor?”

  “Maybe, but those things don’t usually make that much noise, unless it was really big, and they don’t hiss. They also tend to come in fast enough that the plasma shield kicks in.” Amanda stood up and grinned, shaking her head. “If it was a meteor big enough to make that kind of racket, it would have ripped the hull open, and we’re still here, so it didn’t.”

  Jo signaled her agreement by standing up beside her friend. “Maybe that maintenance thing we were talking about on the Regal has caught up to the Gallant?”

  Amanda seemed excited. “Could be.” She took off at a slow jog around the bend in the corridor. “We ought to check it out, just to make sure nothing dangerous is going on.”

  Jo shrugged. Amanda was probably right, but Jo didn’t share her enthusiasm.

  When she stepped around the corner, Jo was convinced she was going to die.

  A deformed, gray-skinned person, over two meters in height, pointed his weapon straight at her. It was hard to tell for sure with those large, bulbous eyes, but Jo thought she saw surprise there … and fear. With his weapon still leveled, he ripped his ancient breathing mask off his face.

  “Skvop! Aust skorpt trigen!”

  The Timcree were human, or at least they had been at one time. Their genetic modifications had created some debate as to whether or not the two groups could still interbreed.

  Jo and Amanda froze.

  Behind the man, three more tall, wiry persons stepped out of a gash that had been ripped in the hull of the Gallant by the nose of the Timcree intruder.

  How come the sensors didn’t pick that up? Jo wondered.

  Water dripped from the ceiling where a pipe had been fractured by the impact. Still in his pressure suit, one of the four now stepped forward and examined them. After a second, he gestured with his hand. A series of clicks and tweets substituted for words. Without giving them another look, he turned and stepped back into the small attack vessel attached to the hospital ship.

  Two of the other Timcree raised their weapons toward the women.

  2

  The Timcree

  Long, gray fingers splayed upon her neck held Jo’s head down as she was forced to jog back along the corridors of the Gallant. She wanted to cry; only fear prevented it. Furiously orbiting around the unknown, Josephine’s mind tried to see any explanation that might make sense of the now and help her react to whatever came next.

  The Timcree that held her had a weapon pressed into her back near her kidneys. In front of her, two of the other Timcree trotted, pausing only once as they came to the well-lit areas of the ship. Amanda had been left behind, sealed in the attacking vessel with the fourth intruder.

  Senses wide with fear, Jo wondered over and over, What do they want? What do they want? It was almost certainly suicide to send four lightly armed guerrillas to attack the Ghost Fleet. She doubted they intended to get off again.

  A klaxon blared, and an automated voice stated matter-of-factly, “Do not move. Assistance will arrive shortly.” It was the same message the ship’s AI used when an unauthorized patient left their bed.

  Jo wondered j
ust what kind of security protocols the ship had in place for this, or if the security AI was making it up as it went. There were only a few Marines on the Gallant, nothing that could be called a fighting force, although their number had grown when Fleet Medical recently decided they needed to increase the number of available psychiatric beds.

  Perhaps our lax security is why they’re here and not on a cruiser or a battleship.

  Jo didn’t know any more about the Timcree than she had read in textbooks, and that wasn’t really much. The Timcree were a best-ignored stain on human exploration of space. Originally, the Timcree had been indentured servants for the multicorps that fostered human expansion across the galaxy. Their mutations were supposedly done only with consent, and Unity and other corporate history books stuck to that line, but before the Empire fell to the Unity, most independent Imperial scholars doubted that. The truth was the corporations used the original Timcree as genetic slaves—experimenting on them at will. The last of the Timcree were freed from corporate servitude four hundred years ago. Since then, they had existed on the margins of human civilization as a separate, but definitely not equal, species.

  Jo felt the hand on her neck tense. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the Timcree behind her looking up at the ceiling as the automated voice repeated its message. She thought she could feel the hand shake a little. They kept running.

  As they approached the next intersection, an energy barrier greeted them. Through the yellowish cast, Jo could see that similar barriers had been raised around the three other exits. The Timcree commander stopped and considered the situation for a moment. Reaching to his belt, he retrieved a flat rectangle with a small handle and ran it up the wall of the corridor, next to the barrier. When he had it about chest high, he held it still for a few seconds while a light flashed red, then yellow, and finally green. He slowly began to move the block away from the wall. The energy barrier stretched, pulling away. The commander moved the block some twenty or thirty centimeters before the light on the back of it began to flash yellow again. He let go of the block, which now stayed in place, suspended in the field, leaving a small triangular gap just wide enough for a person to slip through.