Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  Now it was Jack’s turn to shake his head. “I’m sorry, I won’t be able to help you there. I can’t ask any of my personnel to take the risk, not with that kind of plague. In fact, I will have to have all of you checked before you leave.”

  Hope as bright and crisp as fresh air surged through Jo and brought with it a keen awareness of the opportunity in front of her. For six years, she had found no way to escape the confines of the fleet that held her. She answered the call before she even had time to think. “I’ll do it!”

  Jack looked at her, frowning, clearly disappointed to hear her voice. “No, you won’t.”

  Jo stood and faced him. “I know what I’m doing. I’ll do it.”

  He was shaking his head now, his hands back on his hips. “Absolutely not! This isn’t even a conversation. What about your surgical residency? Do you know what kind of strings Jonas pulled to get you in? Your term isn’t complete.”

  As Jo felt the suffocating weight of the fleet closing in on her again, desperation kicked in. She got in Jack’s face, matching his tone. He wasn’t going to keep her here, not when there was an escape hatch right in front of her.

  “Jack, I’ve done all the hours. I’m just waiting until the formal end of term.”

  When this didn’t seem to make an impression, she lied. “Besides, I don’t want to be a doctor! It’s what everyone else wants for me! It’s not what I want. I’ll do it. Let me do this. I want to help people!”

  Jack was shaking his head again before she even finished. He raised his eyebrows. “No, and that is an order from your commanding officer.”

  Jo felt her face flush. “I resign.” The words escaped before she had thought them through. Resignation from the fleet meant a full memory wipe to protect its secrets. She regretted them right away but kept her face firm. She was committed to going with the Timcree. She either doubled down and won, or this was going to get really ugly.

  Jack started to speak again. This time much more softly, and there was a painful lilt in his voice. “Jo, I can’t let you do that.”

  For a moment they stood there silently, both contemplating what they wanted to say next.

  The commander interrupted. “Do you know her?”

  Jack kept his eyes on Jo, hands on his hips. “She’s my daughter.”

  “The nanites will serve us much better with someone to help us. Send your daughter and the nanites, and we will give you the tritium you need to run your fleet.”

  Jack rubbed his hair with one hand and closed his eyes for a moment to control himself. Without turning to the commander, he said to the ceiling, “You’re telling me that you planned to sneak on my ship and steal the medicine you think you need without getting caught, without knowing how to use it? I’ve come up with some really bad plans my day, but this one beats them all by a parsec.”

  The commander didn’t move. His voice remained calm. “When your people are dying, you cling to whatever hope you can make, no matter how foolish. Our hope may have been foolish, but the universe has a way. Today I met your daughter, and I believe it to be fate. Let her come with us, and the next time I will speak with you without threatening your family first. It was a poor start to a relationship.”

  Jack furrowed his brow and turned to Jo. He spoke slowly. “I agree. It was a poor start on your part.” His eyes watered a little as he next spoke to Jo. “I refuse to accept your resignation…”

  Jo started to interrupt him, but he held up his finger.

  “… but, I will grant your request. You will become the Fleet Medical ambassador to the Timcree. On one condition.”

  “And what is that?”

  “That you come back when you are no longer of service to them. Do you hear me?”

  Jo felt the sting of the hook in that statement. She wasn’t completely free. She was still to be tethered to the fleet, but some freedom, even with conditions, would be better than staying. She kept her voice neutral and her answer short. “Agreed.”

  Jack looked at the commander. “The safety of this spacer remains my responsibility, and she has the favor of the prince. If anything happens to her, there will be consequences, and when you tire of her, or she is ready to return, you will provide her safe passage back to our fleet.”

  The commander stood from his bed and reached out his gray, long-fingered hand. “She will be our honored guest.”

  3

  Three Goodbyes

  Forty-five minutes after she left the Timcree, Jo found herself standing at attention in her dress uniform next to her father, the captain of the Gallant, six Marines, and a small group of senior medical personnel, all waiting for Prince Jonas Athena to board the ship. That the prince himself had shown up to meet the Timcree commander, Jo took as a sign of how serious the fuel shortage must be.

  Second in line to the throne of the defeated Kingdom of Athena, wanted for high treason as well as numerous violations of the Unity corporate code of conduct, the prince was more than a symbolic nuisance to the members of the Ghost Fleet. He was the commander in chief. All the power and all the responsibility landed at his feet.

  However, in this instance, his arrival was carried out with as little pomp as possible. A whistle blew as the airlock opened. Josephine snapped to attention with the rest, looking straight ahead as Jonas stepped onto the ship and then requested permission to board. Behind the prince, Marine General Adrian Gregory and a small contingent of staff followed.

  Jo felt sure that Jack had something to do with the quietude surrounding Athena’s arrival. She couldn’t remember the last time the prince himself had visited a hospital ship except for his annual tour of the fleet. That morale-boosting event came with all the bunting and spit-shining a royal navy could produce. Today, the prince shook hands with the captain, posed for a picture, and was then immediately ushered into a conference room.

  As soon as the captain had dismissed them, Jo could hear the whispers of discontent from the gathered staff. Jo had no doubts as to the source of their irritation. The crisis with the Regal was still ongoing. Each senior surgeon or physician had left wounded patients to put on their dress whites in order to greet the prince like a row of spotless white lambs.

  For a little while, Jo was left waiting outside while Jonas, General Gregory, and her father consulted together, along with the staff. Jo fiddled with her fingers for a few moments as her stomach played a nervous concerto. If she could have, she would have just sailed away on board the Timcree attack craft that was still leeched to the hull of Gallant, but of course, this was the Athenian Navy. There was a proper way to do anything, even a proper procedure to negotiate with “the barbarians,” apparently.

  Jo sat up straight and reminded herself that she was an officer and a doctor, not the scared kid she still felt herself to be.

  The door to the conference room opened, and Jo looked up to see the staff, Gregory, and her father all pile out of the room. Jack caught her eye and tipped his head at the door. Jo stood.

  There was a time when Jo might have fooled herself into calling the prince her friend, but that was now many years ago, when she had been a child and he a teen.

  Jo stood from her chair, straightened her dress uniform, and stepped into the conference room. To her, it felt more like a job interview than a meeting between old friends. She idly wondered what it felt like to him.

  As soon as she stepped in, Jonas opened his arms, and to her utter amazement, pulled her into a brief, chaste, and sincere hug.

  Jo was so shocked she didn’t even manage to get her arms up to hug him back before he let go and stepped back.

  Jonas’s eyes glistened just a little. His voice was surprisingly quiet. “Do you remember that time in my father’s garden where you crawled into the pen with the Athenian sequoia?”

  Jo smiled a little. “I do.”

  “I was absolutely mortified.”

  “And I was far more fascinated with finding myself lying on the ground underneath those thousands of stubby roots.”

  Ev
en now, the prince sounded a little agitated. “Any one of which might have killed you without even knowing you were there if the tree had decided to move.”

  “Why would it move when it was standing in full sun? It’s not like it was in shade.”

  Shaking his head and laughing, the prince answered in mock disdain. “Athenian trees don’t work that way, Jo.”

  Jo returned the laugh. “I think that was the only time I appeared in your father’s daily briefing.” Using a mock aristocratic accent, she continued. “Sire, the urchin refugee child you are sheltering in your fancy palace has been ruining the garden. This time it took three of your royal guard to get her out of the sequoia pen.”

  Jonas laughed. Then for a moment, a soft silence fell between them. “I know this hasn’t been easy on you. There’s nothing I can do to change your mind? I know we haven’t talked a lot recently, but I still value you and your advice. I will be lost without it.”

  Jo was so pulled up short by the open display of affection that she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. She squirmed inside. Even when they had fled with the Ghost Fleet at the end of the war, she and Jonas had talked quite a bit. But in the last two years—since she had started her residency aboard the Gallant—they had rarely talked. And while she had certainly become keenly aware of her loneliness on the fleet since she started school, she was convinced that the source wasn’t due to her distance from her friends. The whole fleet felt like a giant trap, keeping her from living a real life.

  Putting on her best neutral face, she said, “No. I don’t think you can, si—” “Sir” would have been the appropriate response, if not “Your Highness,” but the hug had muddied things.

  Jonas shook his head and smiled sadly. “No ‘sirs’ between us, Jo—never in private.” He sighed audibly. “Your father said I wouldn’t be able to talk you out of it. I thought maybe if I showed up…” Jonas let the thought trail off. “It’s so absurd to be on the opposite side of this.” The prince absently rubbed his fingertips along the synthetic mahogany of the conference table.

  “The opposite side of what?”

  “All my life people have felt a connection to me, and I have had to keep those connections at bay. It took me years to understand how to handle all the attention. With you, I think you keep people at a distance like I do, but for different reasons. We’re a lot alike, you and me.”

  Feeling like her job interview had been suddenly cancelled, Jo relaxed a little, but the prince’s comment stung. That plus his hug had created an emotional stew that Jo really didn’t want to deal with. She felt manipulated into sadness. It irritated her. Almost as if to prove his point, she indulged a false smile. “How so? I mean, I’m not a princess. It seems a bit privileged for a prince to say he’s like anybody.”

  Some part of her knew she was being unkind, but it seemed a less dangerous option to be unkind than to face the emotional whirlwind Jonas had stirred up in her. Besides, she didn’t want to get all sentimental just before she had to leave. It would hurt too much.

  Jonas grimaced. He held his hands out in front of him. “Oh, let’s not go there. That’s not what I meant, but remember, we’re both orphans, and for both of us, most of our choices in life were made for us.”

  Jo continued to smile, but she let it ring hollow on her face. “Yes, but you get to tell people what to do, and they do it. I get to take those orders and do them. If that’s not the definition of privilege, I don’t know what it is.”

  Jonas ran his fingers through his hair and took a moment before he answered. When he did, his voice was raspy. “I can’t tell you how much I love you and hate you for that last comment, Jo. I don’t think there’s another person on this fleet who could get away with talking to me as you do—except perhaps Sophie—and I need those voices in my life. At the same time, you’ve totally blown up the point of what I was trying to say. So this time, I’ll use less tact. Since I can’t convince you to stay, I’ll just say I’m going to miss you, and I think it will be much more than you will miss me.”

  Jo answered instinctively, lying to both of them, fooling neither. “That’s not true.”

  “Yes, it is, Jo. You have a tremendous impact on those around you, and you just don’t see it, and when anything threatens to let you see it, you find a way to push it away.”

  Jo tried to keep the frustration from her voice. She was afraid that Jonas might undo her iron-willed decision to leave, so she answered coldly, “I don’t know what to say to that.”

  Jonas gave her a hollow half smile of his own and finished with more than a note of bitterness in his voice. “I know.” The prince started to the door. His voice sounded harsh, as if it was scratching at his throat as it escaped. He didn’t look back. “Goodbye, Jo. You can always come home. I hope you will find the courage to do so.”

  Suddenly aware, Jo didn’t want things to be uncomfortable between them, so she tempered her irritation. “Jonas?” she said softly, sounding kind.

  “Yes?”

  “Before you leave, you might look in on a few of the staff. They weren’t really happy at being called away from their patients to stand at attention for your arrival. It’s been a hard couple of days. Besides, it would be good optics to visit with the patients from the Regal.”

  Halfway out the door, the prince looked back. He chuckled bitterly. “Thanks. The truth is, Jo, I’m jealous. You get to leave, and I have to make sure that my medical staff doesn’t mutiny. How’s that for privilege for you?” Then he was gone.

  Jo felt strangely light-headed as she sat on the edge of the medical bed. She was dressed in a loose gown that had been pulled off one shoulder, exposing her upper arm to the medical technician, who was busy expanding the small incision he had made to allow the insertion of a prototype device that General Gregory was busy explaining to her.

  Just then, he was busy giving her a list of situations where the AI in the control unit might decide to take control of her body through the self-replicating nanites associated with it.

  He squinted a little and leaned toward her as he spoke, his hands clasped behind his back. “Since you have decided to go ahead with this cockamamie scheme, I will now remind you that you still remain the property of the Ghost Fleet, serving at the good pleasure of our lord. As such, we own your body and your mind. This device will have full access to both ear canals and both your visual cortexes. In short, it will see and hear all that you see and hear, and it will record every second of your life for the duration of your little vacation.”

  Jo wasn’t sure if all of that was supposed to scare her. The fact was that it did the opposite. Her insides started to boil, but she would deal with that later. Keep your eyes on the prize, she thought. “Yes, sir!” she barked.

  “This is a prototype device, and it remains the property of the House of Athena. Any attempts to disable it or remove it will be seen as an act of treason.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  At that moment, the technician gave her arm a strong tug. Jo had just turned her head to see what was up when the general started again. She snapped her head back.

  “Against my better judgment, you are being allowed to leave the fleet, because my lord and your father believe that you will come back and provide them with valuable information. Spacer, while you are gone, you will prove that I am nothing but the worrying ninny that you think me to be. Furthermore, you will prove that your father and the prince have not misplaced their faith. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then good luck, spacer.” The general stepped back and saluted.

  Jo used her free hand to return the salute.

  Packing her things one-handed turned out to be more difficult than Jo thought it would be. The nanites in her system were already busy repairing the tissues that had been torn by the med tech, but to do their job, they had immobilized her arm. Thankfully, it was only supposed to last for an hour, as the nanites could facilitate the basic reknit of her skin tissues by that time.

&nbs
p; Jo was struggling to get the last of her things into the duffel bag when the door to her quarters opened without announcement. She looked up and stopped.

  Amanda stood in the doorway. “You weren’t going to say goodbye, were you?”

  “I…” Jo’s throat suddenly got tight. She shook her head. “With you it hurts too much.”

  Amanda nodded. “I’d say keep in touch, but you can’t.”

  Jo shrugged. “No, I can’t. I’d say the same to you, but…”

  Without preamble, Amanda stepped forward and hugged Jo, squeezing Jo’s immobilized arm into Jo’s stomach. “I love you, Jo. You know that, don’t you?”

  Jo felt tears rise to her eyes. “Yeah. I know.” But not quite the way I love you, she thought.

  When they stepped apart, Amanda wiped a tear from Jo’s cheek. “Take care of yourself, Jo.”

  “You, too.”

  Amanda stepped back out the door, letting it close behind her with a small smack.

  With one more push with her good arm, Jo finished packing her bag. She drew the top closed with the string. Throwing the large duffel onto her shoulder, she looked around the quarters that she had hated for the last two years, suddenly nostalgic. Jo shook off the thought. Forward, Jo, not backward. Escape lies in front of you, not here.

  4

  Korg Haran

  As she stirred a packet of artificial spices into her nutriment paste, Jo watched Razod Kolas out of the corner of her eye, trying to discern any sign of his attitude toward her presence, but the scarred Timcree commander gave no indication that she could perceive. In general, the Timcree’s laconic and taciturn manner gave her so little feedback that when she spoke to them she felt like she was talking into a pillow. Sound went in, but nothing came back.

  Outside the pressure suit that had modulated his voice, Kolas wore a powder-blue jumpsuit similar to those of the crew. To Jo, he looked like any other Timcree—gray skinned, with an overly large head and long, lean limbs.