by Sam Renner
The people on his screen now are the same ones he’d seen arguing down at The Quickstop, it’s just an earlier point in their conversation. It’s a replay of the same hour of news, and Lebbe doesn’t have the patience to sit through this argument again to see what he might have missed earlier. He flips to another station, one that doesn’t replay the same hour of programming over and over and over. Not that any of these were programmed by anyone. There isn’t a human somewhere saying yes to this and no to that. These are simply feeds setup by someone, a technician most likely, when Zulu came online. So, Lebbe switches feeds, this one streaming the game show he’d watched at The Quickstop previously. New contestants this time. Same pretty assistant.
He sets the remote down and gets lost in her flipping of the tiles. One episode airs and then another, just as repetitive as seeing the news replay over and over, but somehow more tolerable.
Lebbe’s eyes are heavy. He’s wanting sleep, and he’s nearly found it when his datapad vibrates four quick times on the counter in the kitchen. His body reacts, sitting bolt straight. Four pulses. It’s a message, and it’s from Earth.
Lebbe stumbles from the couch and into the kitchen. He grabs his datapad and fumbles with the screen and the security code. Its face blinks red. Wrong code. He tries again. Red. Once more. Slower this time. Deep breaths to calm himself. There. He’s in.
It’s a message from Mindy, his ex.
He hesitates before he hits play, a million questions speeding through his head and none of them coming with an answer. Why her? Why now? What could she want? If she’s contacting me, it can’t be good, can it?
Then he does it. It’s a quick stabbing motion with his index finger. Almost instinctual. Then there she is. She isn’t speaking, only looking at the screen. She looks old. Worn. Tired. Like she’s been crying. Then she starts.
“Hi, Jim. It’s me. It’s Mindy. I don’t …” She pauses. Pulls her lips in and then begins biting the top one. Lebbe’s seen it a million times. She’s thinking, considering her words. She starts again.
“Hi, Jim. It’s Mindy. Didn’t think I’d be contacting you on here. Had to go find the info you left for the girls to even send this. That took an hour, and I’d worked out what I was going to say during that time. But now, I don’t …”
She pauses again. Closes her eyes. It’s like she’s running her lines. Opens her eyes again and exhales then begins again, diving in with both feet this time.
“We don’t know where Sarah is. She was at one of the protests a couple of nights ago, and she never came home. Molly has been out looking for her. I’ve been contacting anyone and everyone I know or can think of …” Her voice catches. She stops. A tear falls down her cheek and then there’s another and that one is followed by more.
She begins again. “No one can find her. She’s not been seen at any hospitals. She’s not been home. We don’t know where she’s at. I know that’s not necessarily news you want to hear, but I thought you should know. I’ll do my best to keep you posted.” The message stops, and Lebbe drops the tablet to the floor. He follows a moment later.
SEVEN
It's weird, Grey thinks, that there'd be a section of this station that feels unfamiliar. But here, in the medical wing with its light tan walls and plinky plonk music piped in overhead, Grey feels out of place. It's the only area of Zulu made to resemble facilities on Earth, and maybe that's why it makes Grey just slightly uncomfortable. This isn't her norm. At this point, she’s spent more of her life away from Earth than on it. The livable but industrial look of the rest of Zulu is what Zulu says home to her.
This hall snakes on and ends at a glass door with “Quiet. Patients sleeping.” etched in its center.
She turns to a keypad to the right of the door and places her IFD tattoo in front of a scanner. She waits a moment and a light on the pad turns green and the door slides open. She steps through.
A few steps down the hall and a medical bot slides out from the wall and stops her. It asks for her identification, and she pulls a badge from her pocket and shows it to the bot. It scans the badge then lets her pass. Except for the pilot from the invaded hauler, there's nobody else here. The halls are eerily quiet, and she can hear the beeping and buzzing of equipment keeping the pilot comfortable.
The medical unit on Zulu isn’t meant for long-term stays. It’s a triage unit. If you get sick on Zulu you don't stay on Zulu long. There are only four medical bays, and they're almost always empty. Grey looks down the darkened hall and sees light coming from one room. That's her pilot.
She approaches the room and looks inside. She sees something she wasn't necessarily expecting. This woman is small. She's almost petite. Her hair is short, coming down just to her shoulders. She’s sleeping.
Grey steps into the room, barely past the door, and watches. She watches the woman breathe. She watches the medical bots do their business: Checking this. Changing that. Doing what they are programmed to do.
Grey thinks about this woman and her ship, the one that's at the bottom of Grey’s station sitting in some darkened hole. Grey wonders what the woman is like. Wonders what that moment was like for her when her ship was boarded. She could hear the fear and the wariness in the woman’s voice when she contacted Zulu. That's why she wanted to help. Grey felt something for this woman. A kinship? Some kind of female captain’s bond that she’d never experienced before?
Grey stares at the woman from the door, this stranger who's not really a stranger. She wants to go over and wake her. Gently shake her shoulder until she blinks her eyes slowly and looks up and sees Grey. Then Grey can ask all of her questions: What was that experience like? Where was she headed? Why was she contacting Zulu, and why hadn't her ship been communicating with Zulu already?
She fights the urge and lets the woman sleep. But these questions will be asked. The woman will wake up, if for no other reason than she needs to be moved off Zulu and on to some place where she can better recover.
Grey steps back out into the hall and goes to the keypad along the wall across from the woman's room. She scans her badge and the pad unlocks itself. Grey starts typing commands and that datapad begins to spit a print out that details the woman’s condition, not that Grey's a medical expert. She was trained, like all other station captains were, on the medical equipment that's here, so she's not looking at this print out blind. But she doesn't know in detail what it’s telling her. She can tell two things. One, the woman isn’t about to die. Two, she’s also not about to wake anytime soon.
She sets an alert for the equipment to let her know when the woman wakes up. Grey has questions to ask.
+++++
Get up, Lebbe tells himself. But he can't. His mind is ready; it wants to get up and begin moving and thinking and working toward finding his daughter. But his body is stuck, nailed to the floor, pinned by shock and worry and wonder and disbelief.
This can't be real, he thinks. There's no way that his girl has gone missing. She’s smarter than that. She wouldn't put herself in a position to get taken by someone or overtaken by some group of people. She’d have gotten out of the way of danger. She would have used all the lessons he taught her about assessing a situation and realizing when it's going bad and getting away from it before it turns into a worst case scenario. He was a horrible father. He knew that, but if he only gave his girls one thing, it was that.
But this is real; it is happening. And that realization slowly frees his body from the floor and allows him to stand. It allows him to go to the couch and turn on the news. Allows him to watch all of the footage on every channel and study it. Then to watch it again and again and again as it repeats.
He tunes out the commentators because he doesn't care what they have to say. He just needs to see home, to see Dallas. To pick out someone or something he recognizes and then start putting together the pieces. All of the police work he did for all those years is now coming home. It's wrong to say it's beginning to pay off. It paid off for years, keeping his kids fed. Keepi
ng them in shelter. But now it feels different, like this is why he'd spent those years doing the work to build the skills. It was all leading to this.
So he studies his screen. He watches one hour of news, then he watches that same hour repeat. He studies different things. He looks to different parts of the screen. He begins to realize that this isn't the way to do this. He should be pausing the video, rewinding the footage and playing it over again in half speed. But, he doesn't have those capabilities. So he sticks with this elongated process, taking meticulous notes about what he's seen so far and then waiting impatiently for the same 30 seconds to repeat an hour later.
It's been hours now of this watch, wait, watch, wait and he's to the point of it all being counterproductive. His eyes aren't seeing the things they should be seeing. His mind isn't making the connection it should be making. It's like a long stakeout when you've overstayed your time in the car and you're trying to watch the same block. Eventually, all you can see is a giant haze of nothing in front of you.
So he stops. He rests, and he let’s his mind wander. He starts remembering to earlier, when he was at the counter at The Quickstop, how he was asking questions about his girls. Wondering if they’d be in the middle of the trouble. Almost wanting them to be in there and be involved, caring about and fighting for things bigger than they are. Then he begins blaming himself. He starts convincing himself that if he were there and able to watch them closer, to be the dad he should have been, he could have kept this from happening.
Then he tells himself no. He’s a cop again, and now he's talking to himself as if he's the parent of some victim of some awful crime. This isn't your fault. You couldn't have done anything different. Sometimes things just happen. It's the truth, but it’s not good enough. Now, he recognizes just how hollow those words sound and how empty they feel. He could have done something differently. He could've done something more. He could have never left, toughened up and dealt with a job that he didn't love. Dealt with an ex he didn't have patience for. He keeps thinking these things as his mind shuts down and he drifts into a sleep he doesn't want--a sleep he doesn't feel like he deserves.
Lebbe rolls over on to the remote control, and it jabs him in the ribs. It wakes him out of his sleep. He slowly sits up and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, pushing hard to get all the sleep out and get himself ready to go again. There will be new footage on his screen now, and he needs to watch it. He needs to study it. He needs to investigate like he was still a detective, looking for the tiniest piece of anything that could give him some help.
He stands and moves to the couch. He reaches for his datapad before he grabs the remote to turn on the screen. He wants to see the datapad lit up with messages from Mindy and the girls telling him to stop the search, that they found Sarah. But there’s nothing, just a half dozen missed messages from Grey.
He dismisses all them and tosses his pad aside. He picks up the remote and activates his screen.
+++++
Caroline Gray is alone in Zulu’s control Room. She's pulled a chair out from under one of the unused technicians’ desks and set it in the middle of the floor. She leans back in the seat and looks up at the wide open screen in front of her. It's nothing but indicator lights and blinking flashing bulbs. It's early and this is her routine. She likes to be alone in this room and remind herself of the vastness of space around her. It gives her perspective, she thinks. Plus she's waiting for an update on her datapad. Something to tell her that the woman who's asleep deep in the belly of her station is about to wake up. Something that tells Grey this woman is about ready to answer questions.
She needs Lebbe. She knows that. She doesn't like it, but she knows it. She's tried to rouse him six times so far but has gotten no response. It’s early still, and it's not critical she reach him yet, but it will be once the woman wakes up. She doesn't want to go in there alone and start asking questions. She wants the backup of Lebbe. She wants his history and natural skepticism.
He’s a bit of a security blanket for her when it comes to these kinds of things. She wouldn't tell him that, of course, because she doesn't want to feed into an ego that is already oversized. She needs to maintain some level of control of this place. But she does like having him there as a sounding board, someone who can be the yin to her yang. Or is it yin and yang at all? She doesn't know. She just knows what she needs is someone to be the devil’s advocate without asking them to play that role. That's Lebbe.
The door opens behind her. It's Keith. He’s coming in to start his shift. He greets Grey with a nod.
“Sleep well?” She asks. Small talk, neither of them are good at it, but it’s their awkward morning routine.
“Well enough.” He pulls the chair out from under his desk and begins the login process. It's rather laborious, but security is important on a place like Zulu. Grey watches him work then asks if he has access to cameras in the medical bay.
“Of course,”
“Can we get a feed up in here?”
“Sure. Where you want it?”
“Just something small at the bottom of the screen. I want to know when the pilot wakes up.”
Keith punches a sequence of keys, and a moment later their pilot is up in a box in a corner of the big screen. She’s still sleeping.
“Hasn’t woken up yet?” Keith asks.
Grey gets up and goes to stand in front of the image. “Not yet, but the med bots will make sure she’s up when she’s in shape to be.”
“I did contact the Manhattan,” Keith says. “If her injuries aren’t life threatening they are going to ask us to hang onto her for a while. They are out of bays right now and can’t take an evac.”
Grey stares at the woman. The pilot doesn’t move. If the med bot wasn’t swinging an arm out to check a reading, the image would look almost static.
“Tell them that we can hold her for a bit,” Grey says. “Our only limitation is the amount of meds she may need. Eventually, we may have to restock.”
“I’ll let them know,” Keith says.
Grey thanks him then excuses herself from the room. She messages Lebbe again as she heads down the hall and toward the elevator that will take her to Zulu's main floor. She gets a notification that the message went through. She stares at the pad, waiting for some indication that he's responding, but her screen doesn't change. She tucks the pad under her arm as the elevator doors open.
People roam the main floor of Zulu. She checks her itinerary then her watch. Two ships should have docked since midnight. Another is set to arrive within the hour. She should have known that, would have known that if she hadn’t been distracted by this pilot and her rogue ship.
You know better. Nothing can get in the way of the schedule. Focus, Caroline.
She walks to the The Quickstop and takes a seat near the back, away from the crowd. She watches the people at the counter order food. She watches others eat, shoveling the food in like they haven’t seen a real meal in years. Then she reminds herself that some of these people may not have. Living on Zulu can make you forget what life this far out is really like for most people here. They come on a ship that’s down to low rations or no rations. And even when they did have food it was mostly dried and packed tight. So, it’s noodles and beans for most of the journey. Having a place like The Quickstop where they can order something hot and cooked on a grill or baked in an oven is a treat. These crews took advantage, and most of them forgot their manners on the way here. They eat like savages, and it makes Grey cringe.
Carole approaches with a cup of hot coffee, steam rolling out of the top of the mug. She has a plate of whole wheat toast in her other hand—three slices. A small dollop of butter hangs to the edge of the plate. A couple dollops of orange marmalade clings to the opposite side.
“Good morning, Ms. Grey,” Carole says as she slides the cup and plate in front of Caroline.
“Hi, Carole. How are things in your part of Zulu?” Grey grabs a packet of sugar from the holder on the table and adds the c
ontents to her coffee and gives it a stir, the spoon ringing off the sides of the mug.
“Comfortably busy,” Carole says.
“I just looked at the day’s itinerary.” Grey butters a piece of toast while she speaks. “Things should stay that way, at least for a while.”
She adds a thick layer of orange marmalade while Carole says “You know I like to hear that.”
Grey crunches a bite of the toast, the marmalade catching in the corner of her mouth. She licks the spot away then asks: “Have you seem Lebbe this morning?”
Carole stops and looks at her watch. “Actually, no. He hasn’t been down. But I’ll let you know when I do.”
