Becalmed

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  ~ * ~

  Becalmed

  [Diving Universe Novella]

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  No copyright 2012 by MadMaxAU eBooks

  ~ * ~

  H

  ere’s what they tell you when you want to leave the Fleet:

  Stay behind. Don’t get back on the ship, not even to retrieve your things. Have someone bring the important items to you.

  Check to see if any of your friends or any members of your family want to leave as well. Don’t force them. For most of us, the ship is and has always been home. Life on a planet—any planet—is different. Very different. So different that some can’t handle it, even if they think they can.

  Don’t go to a base. Don’t ask to be dropped off. Stay. Create a new life with the grateful people you’ve saved/helped/rescued.

  Become someone else.

  They tell us these things before each mission and then again as one is ending. They tell us these things so that we can make the right choice for us, the right choice for the ship. The right choice for everyone.

  They do this because they used to forbid us from leaving. We were of the ship, they’d say. We were part of the Fleet. We were specially chosen, specially bred.

  We were, they said, able to overcome anything.

  But that wasn’t true. Even with ships built for five hundred people, there is no room for one slowly devolving intellect, one emotionally unstable but highly trained individual.

  No room for the crazy, the sick, or the absolutely terrified.

  The key, however, is finding that person. Figuring out who she is.

  And what to do about her.

  ~ * ~

  It had been a slaughter. Twenty-seven of us, and only three survived.

  I am one of the survivors.

  And that is all I know.

  I sit on the window seat in my living area, staring out the portal. I had asked, back when I got promoted the very first time, to have an apartment on the outer edges of the ship. I’d been told apartments that brushed against the exterior were dangerous, that if the ship sustained serious damage I could lose everything.

  But I like looking out the portal—a real portal, not a wall screen, not some kind of entertainment—at space as it is at this moment.

  But I do not look into space.

  Instead, I have activated a small section of my wall screen. I read and reread the regulations. I translate them into different languages. I have the ship’s computer recite them to me. I have the children’s school programs explain them.

  The upshot is the same:

  I should leave. I should never have come back to the ship. That was my mistake.

  Theirs was to keep me and not ask me to remain planetside.

  These errors make me nervous. They make me wonder what will happen next, and that is unusual. The ship thrives on structure. Structure comes from following a schedule, following the rules, following long-established traditions.

  Tradition dictates an announcement to the entire crew at the beginning and end of each mission: the always familiar, easily quotable regulations about disembarking at the next stop, about leaving if you can no longer perform your duties.

  We should have gotten that announcement as soon as the anacapa drive delivered us to this fold in space. We have been here too long.

  Even I know that.

  Each ship in the Fleet has an anacapa drive. The drive works also works as a cloak, although my former husband objects to that term. If the Ivoire is under attack, the captain activates the anacapa drive, which moves us into foldspace. We stay in foldspace only a moment, then return to our original position seconds or hours later, depending on the manner in which the navigators programmed the anacapa. Sometimes, in a battle, seconds are all you need. The enemy ship moves; we do not. We vanish for a moment. Then we reappear, behind them.

  Or we don’t reappear for hours, and they think us long gone.

  Either way, we are only in foldspace for a moment.

  We have been in this foldspace for days.

  I bring my feet onto the window seat, press my thighs against my breasts, and rest my head on my knees.

  No one will tell me anything. I am shaky and emotional, unable to remember. Unable to think clearly about anything.

  And for a woman who has spent her entire life thinking, this change terrifies me most of all.

  ~ * ~

  After four Ship Days, they open my apartment door.

  They don’t knock. They override the locks—locks I’ve programmed in my paranoia.

  I don’t recognize them, although I recognize their gold uniforms.

  Medical Evaluation Unit: Psychological and Emotional Stress Department.

  How many people have I sent to them over the years? How smug have I felt when the medics in the gold uniforms take troublesome workers from my linguistic unit?

  Now they’ve come for me—four Ship Days after we entered this foldspace, ten Ship Days after I was medivacked from our makeshift headquarters on Ukhanda, nine Ship Days after they asked what the Quurzod had done and I answered, “To my knowledge, nothing at all.”

  To my knowledge.

  Which is terrifyingly incomplete.

  Two men and a woman stand in my doorway. I don’t recognize any of them. Clearly, they were never on the teams that took workers from my section.

  The woman is the spokesman. She introduces herself. The name washes over me even though I try to catch it, hang onto it, remember it.

  Her spiel isn’t what I expect. I expected the standard: You have the right to refuse treatment. You have the right to remain in your apartment until we reach planetside. You have the right to your own medical professional.

  Instead, she says, “You are about to undergo a battery of psychological tests. Some will prove exceedingly difficult and/or uncomfortable. Some are designed to retrieve memories you—or something around you—have blocked. These tests will provide us with the truth as you understand it. They will also show if you still retain what is commonly known of as your sanity. Do you understand?”

  Oh, I understand. I should be relieved by this, but I am not. I swallow uncontrollably. I am shaking.

  What I want to say, what I’m trying not to say, is that I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to know.

  Just charge me and be done with it.

  Take me back to Ukhanda and leave me there, like you were supposed to.

  Forget I even exist.

  “Do you understand?” she asks again.

  One of the men stares at me, as if he’s trying to figure out whether or not I can speak. I can speak in fifteen languages, and twenty-three different dialects. I can understand sixty languages, albeit some imperfectly.

  I can speak. And I do understand. I just don’t want to admit it.

  She starts, “Do you—”

  “Yes,” I say, thinking that will end her spiel.

  But it doesn’t.

  “You will want an advocate,” she says. “That can be a friend, a family member, or a professional. We can provide you with a list of professional advocates or you can contact one on your own.”

  I dry swallow again. An advocate? I’d heard this in legal matters, but not in psychological ones.

  What did I do on Ukhanda?

  Do I know?

  Do they?

  “Am I in serious trouble?” I ask.

  For a moment, the woman’s eyes soften. I sense compassion. But then, I might be searching for it.

  Or seeing it where it does not exist.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Could it damage my family?” I ask.

  “Yes,” she says.

  I have left my family out of this so far. I haven’t contacted them since my return. Nor have
I allowed any of them to contact me, although they’ve tried. I have shut them out, changed the contact codes, refused to acknowledge them when they’ve been outside my door.

  Now I feel a bit of comfort—what I had seen as selfish behavior will benefit them after all.

  “I’m not going with you until I have an advocate,” I say.

  “Good choice,” she says, and waits while I contact the best advocate we have.

  ~ * ~

  I have never met my advocate before, but I have followed her work for nearly a decade. Legal matters onboard ship are often petty, but they provide real-time entertainment of a kind that most fictions can’t.

  And when the legal matters spill into the Fleet, then the entertainment ratchets up.

  Leona Shearing has handled some of the biggest intraFleet controversies, but she keeps her hand in on the smaller cases, mostly, she tells me when she arrives at my apartment, because she likes to remain busy. IntraFleet controversies happen only rarely. Smaller, shipboard cases occur every day.

  She acts as if I’m a smaller shipboard case. I don’t disabuse her of this notion, although she is surprised that three medical personnel have come to take me away, not the usual two.

  She is a flamboyant woman who wears her hair down. She prefers flowing garments, unusual clothing in the Fleet, where most every department has its own uniform and the uniforms differ only by color. She does not work for the Fleet. She runs her own business. All the advocates have their own businesses, as do some of the tutors scattered across the ships. Specialists on the Sante often work privately as well, and so do many of the restaurateurs on the Brazza.

  Still, working for someone other than the Fleet is unusual, and risky. Many do not acknowledge their difference, wearing clothing that suggests a uniform. Leona Shearing accentuates her difference with her clothing and her hair. Her manner, however, is strictly professional.

  She interviews me briefly—asking my name, my rank, my position, as if she’s checking to see if I am of sound mind. Then she turns to the three medical personnel, who have not left the room, and asks them why they didn’t just send for me.

  “She needs to be escorted,” the woman says.

  “You only need two people for that,” Leona says.

  “One stays. We have occasion to search the apartment.”

  She frowns, then narrows her eyes as she looks at me. “Did you let them in here?”

  “No,” I say. “They overrode the codes.”

  She stands. “You need to tell me what she’s being accused of.”

  “She ran a team of twenty-seven to study the Quurzod,” the woman says. “Only three returned.”

  “I assume she’s one of the three who returned,” Leona says.

  “Yes,” the woman says.

  “The twenty-four are dead?” Leona asks.

  “We believe so,” the woman says.

  “You don’t know?” Leona asks.

  “We have not verified the deaths,” the woman says.

  Something whispers across my brain, too fast for me to catch it.

  “Are the other two survivors being investigated?” Leona says.

  “No,” the woman says.

  “Why not?” Leona asks.

  The woman looks at me. “She’s the only one who broke away from the group.”

  My stomach clenches. I have to will my hands not to form fists. I lean against the portal, unable to look at the strangeness of space.

  “So?” Leona says.

  “So she’s the only one we found covered in blood,” the woman says.

  I bite my lower lip. Technically, they didn’t find me. Technically, I staggered into a nearby village, and the villagers contacted the ship.

  Technically, I found them.

  “I still don’t see the issue,” Leona asks. “I’m sure you tested the blood. From your tone and her appearance, I’m gathering that it wasn’t all hers.”

  “None of it was hers,” the woman says.

  I glance at Leona. I expect her to look at me, then get up and nod toward me regretfully, to tell me that I no longer deserve her services. But she doesn’t look in my direction at all.

  Instead, she says to the woman, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we at war with the Quurzod?”

  “We weren’t then,” the woman says.

  “We weren’t friendly,” Leona says. “We were there at the request of the Xenth, to investigate claims of genocide, were we not?”

  The woman stiffens. So do I. I don’t remember genocide. I don’t remember going planetside.

  I don’t remember anything except the heat, the dry air. The stench of drying blood.

  “We weren’t at war yet,” the woman says primly.

  “We were in unfriendly territory, trying to change the balance of power,” Leona says. “That’s as close as you can get without declaring hostilities.”

  The woman’s mouth thins. The men haven’t moved. It’s as if the conversation is going on in another room.

  I try not to look at them. I try not to look at any of them.

  “I am not a politician,” the woman says. “I’m not sure at what stage a war becomes a war.”

  “Perhaps at the first sign of bloodshed,” Leona says.

  “I think that’s too simplistic,” the woman says.

  “I thought you weren’t a politician,” Leona says.

  They stare at each other. My heart pounds. I’m not sure what my advocate is playing at.

  The woman takes a deep breath. “They say she caused the deaths.”

  “Who says?” Leona asks, and I hear a new note in her voice. Triumph? Had she been fishing for information? Was that why she goaded the medics?

  “The other two,” the woman says.

  “The other two,” Leona says. “Who weren’t covered in blood.”

  “Yes,” the woman says.

  “Who didn’t stagger out of the desert alone, dehydrated, and nearly dead,” Leona says.

  Was I nearly dead? I don’t remember that. I just remember how the heat served up mirages like water, how the air had so much dust it seemed like a live thing, how my skin burned to the touch.

  “What were they doing while their colleagues were dying?” Leona says.

  The woman gets that prim look again. “I don’t know,” she says. “You’ll have to ask them.”

  She’s lying. She knows.

  My stomach is a hard knot. I rest one hand against it, hoping to soothe it.

  “If you suspect her of a heinous crime,” Leona says, “why did you let her back on ship?”

  “She has the captain’s protection,” the woman says.

  I wince. I didn’t ask for that. He shouldn’t be involved.

  “The captain can’t protect her,” Leona says. “He should know that. If she’s done something wrong, she gets punished— planetside.”

  “We’re at war,” the woman says. “We couldn’t keep our people planetside.”

  “Then we leave her and bring the innocents back,” Leona says.

  I close my eyes. She’s right. That’s what the regulations say. I shouldn’t be here.

  “The captain can’t change the regulations,” Leona says. She’s clearly pushing something, but what I don’t know.

  “Actually,” the woman says, “that’s a gray area. We have two policies, the modern and the ancient. Both apply in this case.”

  Leona frowns. She doesn’t agree. Isn’t it her business to know the regulations? Isn’t she the expert in them, like I’m the expert in languages?

  “No one gets left behind,” the woman says. “That’s the ancient regulation. No matter how criminal, how perverted, how sick, no one gets left behind.”

  She looks at me as she says those things and she has that look in her eyes again. What I had initially taken for sympathy is something else. Fear? Disgust?

  “The captain chose to follow that regulation,” the woman says.

  “Is that why he didn’t run the announcement?” I as
k.

  “I don’t presume to know why the captain does what he does,” the woman says. “He should have left you behind.”