by Sam Renner
“Appreciate that,” Grey says before taking a drink of her coffee.
Carole walks away, and Caroline turns her attention to the screens hanging above the counter at The Quickstop. It’s the news from home that Lebbe told her about the day before. There’s fighting. There’s protesting. There's rebellion. It all means very little to Grey.
She didn't grow up on Earth. Of course, she comes from there, and she does have that gut-level tie to the place, but she spent most of her time growing up in schools that were not earthbound. So when Lebbe gives her reports from home that say there is trouble she doesn't necessarily know how to react. She knows she should probably look concerned or that she should fake some sort of interest, but she doesn't really know how to do that either. So he'll tell her things are bad. He'll tell her there are reports of problems that could be coming their way, but it doesn't mean much to her. She wishes it did. She wishes she had some sort of way to bond with Lebbe, and she knows being concerned with what's happening back on Earth could do that.
So she watches the fighting on the screens and tries to pick up what she can. City names pop across the screens, like Dallas and Kansas City and Des Moines. But, again, her earthbound life was so short that she doesn't really recognize the places or any of the people. She can tell that it's bad and that she should be concerned. And maybe Lebbe is right. Maybe some of this will spill their way. Granted, it could take a long time, but maybe she should be at least somewhat concerned this is all going on.
She takes the last bite of her toast and tries to connect with Lebbe again. She sends another message to his data pad and waits for a response. She watches more news from Earth, something political that doesn't involve fighting and protests this time. Again, it's all meaningless pictures and words to her. She looks at her pad. Still nothing from Lebbe.
Carole comes back to the table, coffee pot in hand, bringing Grey a refill. She waves her off and thanks her for the breakfast then apologizes.
“I’m sorry, Carole. I didn’t bring anything to pay with. I guess in the excitement of all that went on last night …”
“I don’t know what happened last night, but don’t worry about it. It’s some toast.”
“Thank you so much. And if you see Lebbe…”
“If I see Jim, I’ll let you know.”
Grey checks her datapad again. Still no response from Lebbe. She sends one more message then heads for the elevators. If he won’t respond to her messages then maybe he’ll respond to her coming to his door.
She checks her pad twice on the way up to the crew cabins and watches it as she walks the hall to his door. She doesn’t want to get upset with him. It’s early. She was up late, and she just doesn’t have it in her. But that ball is in his court, she tells herself. He determines how this conversation goes.
She knocks then waits. There’s no answer from the other side.
She knocks again. Still nothing. She puts her ear to the door. She can hear a news broadcast.
She knocks again, and waits a moment before calling his name.
“Lebbe!” Then she knocks again.
It’s another moment then the locks begin to deactivate.
Lebbe looks like he’s spent the night getting beaten up. His eyes are half open. His hair, what’s left of it, goes every which way. He’s in the same clothes he was wearing the day before.
“Good Lord, Jim.” The words just come out.
Lebbe doesn’t react, just stares at her for a moment. “What is it?” he asks.
“Our rogue ship. We’ve got it. Our pilot is in the medical bay.”
“OK.”
“I thought we could …”
Lebbe stops her.
“What’s her condition?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is she conscious?”
“No, not yet. But I thought we might be able to talk about what we know so far …”
Shouting comes from the screen behind them, and Lebbe turns to watch the series of angry faces being streamed across it. Lebbe grabs the remote from the couch and mutes the audio, but he keeps studying the screen.
“Jim?”
He turns back to Grey.
“Sorry.” He takes a deep breath then let's it out slowly. “Continue.”
Grey starts again. “I thought we could go over what we know so far before she does wake up. We are going to hold her here until some room frees up on the Manhattan. I don't know how long that will be, and I don't want to miss the opportunity to talk with her if that's something you think we need to do.”
Lebbe nods while she speaks. “OK,” he says when she finishes. Then he looks back to the screen still playing the news and the mess on his couch. Then he looks back to Grey. “Give me a few minutes to get things together.”
“Come to my office.”
Lebbe nods then closes his door. A few steps down the hall, Grey hears the shouting and fighting return to Lebbe’s screen.
+++++
Lebbe watches the screen for a few more moments. He hasn't sat through a full cycle of news yet, this is all still new footage to him, and he's trying to take it all in. He hasn't seen his daughter yet. He's praying he doesn't see her on one of those screens they show full of smiling faces of now dead kids.
Why was it always the kids who were the collateral damage in fights like this? Was it parents like him who insisted on teaching their young ones to give a damn and speak when needed, to do even more when necessary?
Even if Sarah isn't memorialized in one of those shots, it's no guarantee she's OK. It just means nothing has been properly verified yet. He doesn’t want to let himself find the hope. Too many times he’s seen families allow hope to bubble up. Then when things don’t turn out like they’d wanted that hope shatters and cracks and brings everything down with it. So, he'll keep looking at footage trying to find her, but he’ll heep the reality of the situation front of mind.
This new footage moves very quickly. The fighting is broader. There's more people involved. It's harder to pick up much of anything. He knows he'll need to see it a second and third and fourth time before he'll be able to pick anything up. There is just too much to look at. What he really needs is to be able to slow the footage down. To pause it and rewind it and study it better. He needs to talk to Keith about getting him all of the footage onto a single drive so that he doesn't have to wait for it to repeat.
A task for later, he tells himself. Now, he has to get ready to meet with Grey. He takes a quick shower and turns the water extra hot. He wants to burn yesterday off of himself. He watches the water circle down the drain, and he imagines seeing the charred edges of the fear and dread that he'd felt all night disappear into the tiny hole at his feet. For a moment he feels better, fresh. Then it all starts coming back, one beat at a time. A bit of fear, a bit of dread, a bit of worry. All attaching themselves to him like some ugly sweater.
He turns off the water and wipes condensation from the mirror. He looks beaten up. He feels it.
He finishes in the bathroom then dresses quickly. He stops in the living room. Caught by a bit of new footage he hasn't seen. He shuts the screen off then steps out into the hall to meet Grey. A few moments away from all of this might do me some good, he thinks.
He knocks on the door twice when he gets to Grey's office, and she invites him in. She's sitting behind her desk looking at something on her data pad.
She looks up: "Thanks for coming by, Jim."
Lebbe doesn't say anything; he just has a seat.
“So our pilot is in the medical bay, like I mentioned,” Grey says, “and her ship is in the deep recesses of Zulu. I just want to give you a quick update on everything we know about her so far, and it's not much. She's been asleep since she got here. The med bots on the hauler took care of that. Word from the soldiers who found her was that the ship had been breached by something. They thought pirates, but it was an odd situation. The metal from the side of the ship had pooled like it was melted as opposed to punctured. So this
was no normal pirate operation, if that’s what these were. I don't know that’s what I make of that just yet.”
Lebbe begins to say something, but Grey isn’t stopping. She has the momentum now, and she’s not giving it up.
“Some of our more experienced soldiers seem to think that there's something wrong with her. Or something smells funny about the situation. I spoke with McKibbon, and he thought it was probably just over cautiousness on the part of an experienced soldier. So, I’m choosing not to agree with him. For now, until I have a reason not to.”
Lebbee interrupts: "And how does she look?”
"How does she look?”
“Yes. Is she beaten up? Bruises? Internal bleeding? What else do we know about her time on her ship.”
Caroline straightens herself in her chair. It squeaks as she turns to face Lebbe.
“I don't know any of that. She's not awake, and our soldiers were focused on getting her out.”
“Yeah, fair enough. Means I'll need to look at her ship if you want my take.”
“I do.”
“Then I'll go take a look later today. I have a few things to take care of this morning.”
“Anything I should be aware of?”
Lebbe almost tells her about his daughter, how his mind is a million light years away from Zulu, and it will be until he knows what's happened to his girl. Then he decides against it. She doesn’t need to know. Not yet. “No. Just some personal things.”
“Don’t skirt your regular duties.”
Lebbe stands and says “Yes, boss” as he does.
Grey turns her attention back to her tablet, and Lebbe heads for the door. He looks at his watch. He needs to get back to his cabin. There’s likely new footage to watch.
EIGHT
The screen is playing on the other side of the door as Lebbe fumbles with the key to his cabin. It's muffled commentators talk about the fighting. Lebbe can make out very little, but it sounds familiar, like something he heard earlier.
Good. Nothing new yet.
He relaxes. He slows what he's doing. The lock deactivates this time. He steps inside and it's the same man and woman arguing as when he left. They are making the same points. It's the same loop as earlier.
Enough time to make breakfast.
He steps into the kitchen, keeping an ear and eye on the screen. His single plate and lone fork are in the bottom of the sink. He tries to remember the last time he made a meal at home.
He opens the small refrigerator provided by Zulu, just a couple of shelves and a freezer shelf. It's mostly empty except for a couple of eggs he got from Frank. Anything fresh like that he had to bargain for. Otherwise, everything came vacuum packed from the convenience store, and you can only eat that stuff for so long before you and your taste buds start to go crazy.
The scene on the screen changes from screaming commentators to screaming crowds. An anchor speaks over the top of it: “This is live footage from protests and fighting in Dallas. It's raw video, so we ask for your grace if you see or hear something that you don't typically hear on our air.”
Raw footage? This is what Lebbe's been waiting for. It's like surveillance video when he was a cop. It's not chopped up by some editor to fit some story. It's not just the loudest most violent pieces of footage spliced together. It's what's really happening.
Yes, there's yelling. Yes, there are small pockets that look like they are about to pop. But, overall, what he sees with his cop eyes is two sides all worked up, but no one ready to act.
What he doesn't see is his daughter, so the reality of the situation--at least what was the reality a few days ago--is cold comfort.
He looks at the clock in the bottom corner of the screen. Fifteen minutes until the top of the hour. He has at least an hour before this footage will show again.
He scrambles the two eggs he got from Frank. He pulls the beginnings of mold from a slice of bread and drops it into the toaster. Cooking. It’s a bit of normalcy, and every time he does it, Lebbe tells himself he needs to do it more often. He never does, but it’s a good thought.
Lebbe slides the eggs out of the pan and onto the plate that he’s just cleaned and eats them standing over the stove. He crunches the toast as the same talking heads have the same debate on the screen.
The plate clinks on the aluminium as he drops the plate into the sink. He heads across the living room to the bathroom and turns on the shower. The noise of the water drowns out the talking on the screen, and Lebbe sits on the toilet while the water warms.
He tests the water a moment later and jerks his hand back. It’s scalding. It’s perfect.
Lebbe steps in and the water stings his back. He flinches as his body adjusts. Then he forces himself to stand in the heat—the painful, painful heat.
Every Zulu cabin is allocated a certain amount of hot water per day. It’s enough to go about daily activities. Bathing. Washing clothes. Washing dishes. But Lebbe isn’t worried about those last two. He’s going to spend all of today’s water here, in a shower so hot that he can’t think about anything else but the heat and the pain.
He stands with his back to the shower head and feels the sting as each individual jet of water tries to bore a hole into his back. He waits for the streams of water to come out the front of his chest. That's all he wants to feel, the pain and the burning, because if he tries to feel anything else it just hurts too much.
This is an old trick he learned from a beaten up cop back when he was on the force. It had come after a particularly rough night, they’d lost one of their own to a gang of enviro freaks.
As he was changing out of his uniform, this cop who'd seen this kind of thing before told Lebbe about burning everything away.
“Turn the water scalding,” he'd encouraged. “You want to leave burns. All you’ll feel is the pain and the heat. It's so intense, your body won't allow you to feel or think about anything else.”
So Lebbe tried it, and it worked. He was able to sleep that night, uncomfortably.
He’d used the trick twice since, once when he lost his partner and another time when his dad died, both times finding his solace under the water.
Lebbe’s shower gradually goes cooler, and, before it can turn to ice, he shuts it off and steps out. He grabs a towel and wraps it around his middle then sits on the toilet and watches the water drip from his hair and gather in a large pool at his feet.
What now?
Clothes. A comb for his hair. A tooth brush. Shoes. That's what's next. You have to move. You have to get up and keep pushing forward. That's the only choice he has. Another coping lesson learned from another cop and one he’d repeated to families of other victims. It was the only advice he’d ever given that he thought was worth a damn.
Lebbe gets dressed and moves back to the living room. He watches the screen and more footage. This is new stuff, but he doesn't have the energy to watch any more. He’s seen enough for now. His brain has taken all it can take, and it needs to process what it’s seen so far. He grabs his key card and datapad and heads out into the hall. The door locks behind him, and he goes down to the Quickstop.
+++++
Caroline Grey pulls the datapad out from under her arm and checks it for the third time in the last five minutes.
This woman should be awake already.
But she's not, and there's been no notification that she’s so much as stirred. Grey is tempted to go force the issue. walk down to the medical bay and make the machines wake the woman. She has questions to ask, things she wants to know. and just walking the floors of Zulu has become tiresome.
Grey walks the length of the hall from her office to the elevator that will take her to the main floor of Zulu. She’s spent as much time as she can in her office. She's read everything she can read and watched everything she can watch. It's time to go be productive, be useful. It's time to go be the captain of this transfer station.
Grey steps out into the crowd, something that's a little unusual for Zulu. She hears conversation
. She hears chatter. She doesn't pick up much of any of it, but she's not trying to. She's not concerned with these people. They don't really matter. They won’t be on her transfer station long.
She picks her way through the crowd and heads for the convenience store. She hasn't been in in a while, and it's good to show face. She has pleasant if meaningless conversation with the owner. They share a couple of jokes. She's done her duty. She’s made the owner feel like they're part of the team.
She's back out on the main floor and watching the people mingle and wait and find ways to bide their time. Then it happens; her pad vibrates. She quickly pulls it up in front of her and taps the screen. It comes to life. There's a message; it's from the medical Bay. The patient in Room Four is awake.
