by Letts,Jason
Brina offered a sympathetic smile.
“I’ll never get another piano lesson from my mom. We used to play together for hours. But that’s quite a story. Not everyone can say they’ve survived a bear attack.”
“How does it rank among the others you’ve heard around here?” he asked.
“Being a psychologist on a space station has exposed me to a few crazy stories. I think the firm thought I’d identify some new disorders or conditions, but no one has gone that crazy being up here. That might change soon, however,” she said.
“Should I start booking my sessions with you now? Your time is going to be in high demand,” he said.
“So will yours. You’re the de facto leader of humanity now. That’s a lot of responsibility,” she said, smiling until she saw it hit a sore point with Loris. “What?”
Loris pulled over one of the chairs from the table and sat down.
“There are already people who aren’t happy about that. I’d barely met the chiefs before they were talking about firing me like I wasn’t even there.”
Brina’s pretty brown eyes grew wide with alarm.
“What did you do?”
“I made some excuses about how it was too soon to make any hasty decisions and that we should still stick with Unified’s laws until we can make decisions about our well-being in an objective manner. They bought it for now, but I know if I make one screw-up they’ll find a way to replace me. Maybe no one else believes in me, but I’m starting to think that this moment is what I was meant for,” he said.
“I believe in you,” Brina said, setting her hand on his knee. It’d been hard enough not to read into her sitting on his bed. Getting that support from her made it impossible not to feel how much he wanted her.
“That’s good,” he said, trying to carry on the conversation at hand. “It might help if I had some guidance too. I’m going to see Ex-Commander Stayed.”
“Oh. Are you sure that’s a good idea?” she asked, making it clear she didn’t think it was.
Loris sighed. He couldn’t wait any longer to say the things he had wanted to say to her all along.
“I know you said no last time we saw each other…”
“Loris.”
“Maybe you feel differently now after all we talked about in our messages,” he said, mustering a smile he hoped would win her over. She looked away from him.
“I do feel differently, but it’s because of what happened, not our messages, and where I stand is the same. Whatever plan I had for my life has gone out the window, and right now I can’t even imagine what kind of life I’m going to have, much less who I’m going to spend it with. I should probably get going,” she said, getting up.
“You don’t need to leave. I’m not talking about rushing into anything too fast. I know you’re a very independent person, but we can help each other through this,” he said.
Brina stopped before she got to the door and turned back to look at him, giving him hope.
“I’ll give you my help. If you’re going to see Stayed, there’s something you should know that I learned in my interviews. He’s currently in solitary confinement, and he’s not in there for drunkenness as had been told to the public. The old Chief of Personnel didn’t quit his job and return back to Earth.”
Loris stared at her a moment, hoping what she was getting at wasn’t true.
“You don’t mean…
“Yes, I do. Stayed is being detained for murder, and no one knows why he did it.”
A single guard monitored cameras of the station’s detention center, which at the moment only had one occupant. A quick flash of credentials got Loris through, and soon he was through a heavy iron-reinforced door and on his way down a narrow ill-lit hallway to room number three, where Stayed had been for two weeks.
Loris had been apprehensive about going to Stayed for help before. The information that Stayed was a murderer who had breached the soul of the Unified Officer’s Code by killing a fellow officer for no apparent reason added a dash of disgust to his feelings about the meeting. Before sliding open the door, Loris thought one more time about turning around and forgetting about the entire thing.
The heavy door made a harsh scraping sound as it slid along its track. The hallway light shed enough into the room to provide an outline of a man seated against the wall in the back. Two weeks of confinement and minimal rations had done nothing to diminish the man’s strong physique.
Loris stepped inside and flipped on the light. The man, bearded and wearing white inmates’ clothes, looked up at him with barely concealed anger. His arms hung over his knees.
“If it isn’t the boy wonder. Your mother would be proud. You’re welcome.”
Loris blew threw his nose and nodded.
“Ahh, you’re expecting me to thank you because if you hadn’t done what you did I’d still be back on Earth, which is to say dead. Clever.”
“Sometimes it’s dumb luck or the random happenstance of others that saves us,” Stayed said, shrugging slightly.
“Speaking of which, I’ve heard quite a bit about what you did that got you here. Let me ask you, have you ever heard of the Unified Book of Ethics? Code of Conduct? What about just not throwing away a distinguished career with the Unified fleet by murdering a senior officer in cold blood?”
Stayed glanced around his cell, which had a sleeping mat on one side and a toilet and sink on the other.
“Where is my schedule? I didn’t realize it was time for a boring lecture from a pompous little boy. Or maybe this is the sleep aid I asked for. Keep going and I’ll be snoring in no time.”
Loris’s ire started to rise.
“What made you think the laws didn’t apply to you?”
The two shared a cold, unflinching glare that lasted more than a minute. Stayed’s lips puckered like he had something sour in his mouth.
“Let me tell you something that they don’t teach back at the Unified Training Center. Out here on the Magellan, laws have a weaker grasp on us than they did back home, and that was before a guard came in with my lunch and told me Earth had been destroyed. There’s something about deep space that makes the rules we’ve always lived by seem like gnats that can be brushed aside without any repercussions.”
“I don’t believe you. That’s not how things will be while I’m here,” Loris said.
His comment elicited a strange smirk and snicker from Stayed, who was much too relaxed for Loris’s liking.
“I have a feeling you know more about it than you let on. Now, you didn’t really come here to moralize about the error of my ways, did you? Get to what you really want. I don’t have patience for bullshit,” he said.
Loris had hoped to gain more of an upper hand in the conversation by starting with Stayed’s guilt, but the man didn’t have an ounce of shame enough to give an inch. Still, Loris attempted to get something in exchange for receiving help.
“How about this? I’ll tell you if you tell me why you did it. It might make things better for you down the road.”
Stayed’s tired eyes appraised him carefully.
“Go on then. You go first. I’m not making any promises.”
Loris felt he didn’t have a choice but to go on.
“I want to talk to you about what you would do if you were still in charge. There’s already a lot of pressure on me with no room for error. If I slip up once, they’re going to throw me out of the Commander’s chair,” he said.
The look from Stayed was almost sympathetic. He nodded thoughtfully, and Loris immediately sensed how strange it was to be entering into confidence with the station’s only criminal.
“If someone successfully attacked Earth and managed to get away, what would you do?” Stayed asked.
“I’d hunt them down,” Loris said without hesitating.
“Me too.”
“But I may not get the chance, and it’s not because we have no idea who did it,” Loris went on. “I’ve barely gotten here and already they’re talking about f
inding a way to replace me.”
“Commander Roderick,” Stayed began. “It wouldn’t matter if you found a way to go back in time and prevent the destruction of Earth. Armand Iotache would still try to remove you from command.”
Loris’s eyes widened.
“How do you know about him?”
“Because he was trying to do the same thing to me. There, now you know why I did it,” he said. The confession seemed to take a weight off his shoulders, but to Loris it wasn’t much of a confession at all.
“But you didn’t kill Iotache. You killed the Chief of Personnel, Davis Kepling.”
“What you need to know about Iotache is that he’s spent his entire life sitting in conference room chairs, looking innocent in meetings. He’s a conspirator, a schemer, someone whose trust can only be bought by what you can give him today. He doesn’t know how to get his hands dirty like Kepling did and will always have his henchmen. Iotache curries many favors and maintains a lot of loyalty in this station, but Kepling was his true co-conspirator and at the time was the bigger threat.”
Loris listened intently, but the sense that he missed something overcame him. The story wasn’t adding up.
“Wait a second, what good is killing to keep your position when doing so means you lose your position anyway?”
Stayed looked to the side and scratched his bearded cheek.
“You’ve got to look at it from my perspective. As soon as they started plotting against me, they’d rip my job away from me sooner or later. It might not seem like much to you, but I’ve spent my life working to get here. And I wasn’t about to leave without a fight. Although I’m no longer commander, I’m alive and he’s not. I’ll always take being alive.”
Loris began to grasp the regrettable situation he was in. It didn’t matter who he was or what he did. Iotache was going to come after him regardless.
“And Armand Iotache is doing all of this for what, because he wants to be commander? That seems an awful lot of effort for not much payoff,” Loris said.
“It might’ve been before, but now to be commander is to be leader of the human race. Still, there’s always been something about him that made me think he wanted the job for something else other than listening to reports and signing off on missions. I don’t know what it is, but he has another reason for wanting to be in charge,” Stayed said.
“You really don’t have any idea what he might be trying to do?”
“I don’t, but I can’t see how anything other than faithfully performing the duties of the position could be good for anyone. And it seems like the day’s gruesome events did nothing to change his hunger for it.”
Loris almost wanted to sit down next to Stayed. It felt good to have someone actually understand what he was facing.
“I wonder what he’s really after,” Loris said.
“I can’t be clear enough about it. Do not let him take over as commander, no matter what it takes. Beyond his treasonous behavior and sinister ideas, he’s a callous, unfeeling man who shouldn’t be in charge of anyone else, much less this station. Your mother would understand. She wanted it to be something that brought people together by the promise of expanding our horizons, not a straitjacket that confined us.”
Loris wondered if Stayed was trying to manipulate him by bringing up his mother. It always made him suspicious when people did that. Sometimes people did it because they respected her and enjoyed remembering her. Other times people expected him to blindly follow any suggestion of what she would’ve done or liked or thought.
“And how am I supposed to keep Iotache at bay?” Loris asked.
“By letting me out so we can take him on together,” Stayed said. Loris pursed his lips, slotting this invocation of his mother in the latter group.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
“Then don’t be surprised if it plays out that you make the same decision I did.”
“I won’t do that.”
They locked eyes again in another tense exchange. Loris questioned if any of what he heard was true, or if it was the product of some good guesswork and a desire to get out of solitary confinement. He stepped back closer to the door and was ready to leave without another word, but one more thought occurred to him. He glanced back at the burly man hunched against a dark wall.
“We will decide on an appropriate punishment for you soon enough.”
“I hope you don’t forget your promise that things will be better for me,” Stayed said, a hint of desperation in his voice for the first time.
“There’s something about deep space that makes me think that promises can be brushed aside without any repercussions.”
CHAPTER 5
The remnants of Earth lay before them like a vase shattered into a billion pieces.
“There’s a lot of instability in these masses. Let’s stay safe and keep our exit path clear. We don’t need to rush,” Loris said over the com to the rest of the fleet.
After spending his first night on the Magellan and taking the next day to plan, he’d ordered the Magellan to return to Earth and begin the long process of searching through the remains. From afar the planet now looked more like an asteroid field, a floating group of rocks held near each other by gravitational forces, but as the fleet got closer and began to fan out a more detailed picture emerged.
In some places the surface had been nearly untouched. Even the smaller masses on the outskirts had intact roads and particularly sturdy buildings rooted into the ground. But with the atmosphere gone and all of the green and blue drained away, it was like these structures had been built on the surface of the moon. More bizarre, chunks of ice larger than their ships drifted among the debris, composed of parts of the ocean that weren’t vaporized in the explosion.
The Balboa, with Sonia Firth at the helm and charged with harvesting plant and animal matter for reconstitution, latched onto one of these ice chunks as the rest of the fleet passed. The Hudson had the task of scanning the debris for any human survivors. It wasn’t out of the question that someone somewhere had made it into a safe hold or even a grounded spaceship that weathered the blast. The Erickson trawled for supplies and equipment.
As they got closer, they saw in vivid detail what had befallen the majority of humanity. Those that didn’t die along the explosion’s fault lines from the nuclear blast were likely crushed by the earthquake that shook the entire globe, leveling entire cities and pulverizing structures with force and carnage unimaginable. Those still alive were then subjected to the sudden onrush of empty, cold space and died of suffocation before the freezing temperatures could get to them.
These were the morbid things Loris couldn’t help himself from thinking about as he directed the Cortes through narrow channels between the rocks that could collapse and crush them with just a tiny shift. They’d studied the trajectory of Earth’s fragments and were carefully maneuvering through to one very specific spot. They came to a spot in the channel that was clogged tight by small rubble. A dead body collided with the ship’s windshield, making everyone wince.
“This makes my worst nightmares look like fairy tales,” Panic said. Lopez looked over at her, but no one responded.
After spending so much time thinking about death, the actual sight of death made Loris think about how silly it was to call the front window of a space ship a windshield when there was no wind in space. Sometimes words live on beyond the source of their meaning.
“Let’s fire up the shields and use them to muscle our way through,” Loris said.
The ship’s shields were a steady stream of proton particles that created a protective barrier with enough mass and force to absorb energy-based shots and repel incoming projectiles. It was just one of the tricks the Cortes could employ; in truth the Cortes was designed to be more of a ruthless killing machine than a ship, despite its powerful engines. Loris loved to be on it whenever possible. It gave people with a propensity to think about death plenty to ponder.
The dead body and other rubble clea
red from view as the ship pushed through the tight channel. Beyond, they saw rock masses composed of the Earth’s liquid core. The surface was smooth but had grown hard as the heat and the cold struggled for equilibrium. The last gasp of the planet would be its heat death, when its temperature balanced with that of its surroundings, as per Newton’s Laws of Thermodynamics.
The Cortes pulled upward away from the core and hugged the surface of the large mass it had just squeezed through. Loris had flown along this stretch of Earth countless times, and even though the terrain appeared different there was still something familiar about it.
“Do you think we’re really going to find them?” Lopez asked.
Loris set his jaw and tugged at the spacesuit stretching over his arm as they approached their destination. He nervously tapped his helmet beneath his seat with his foot.
“We’re not leaving until we do,” he said.
They came over a plateau in the rock and surveyed their destination. Just a few days before the place had been covered in vegetation and sat beside a shimmering sea. Now all of the plants had burned away, the sea had vacated and left a bare sloping cliff face, and the buildings were partially standing junk heaps.
Loris released a tense sigh.
“Alright, let’s get to work clearing the entry point.”
The Cortes hovered over one of the damaged buildings and fired a grappling hook from its underbelly to dislodge a large, fallen wall and send it spiraling away into space. The ship had the shape of a traipsing spider with stiff but spindly legs, allowing it to gingerly position itself over the remaining wreckage and drill through it. At last, the viewer gave them a glimpse of an empty elevator shaft leading down into darkness.
“The underground levels appear mostly intact. As best we can tell they’d be right where Chief Iotache said they would be,” Lopez said.
