Savage World

by Jennifer Slusher

  He wouldn't say anything in front of the others. In private, maybe. Tom's trip down the bottle seemed to be getting worse. He was clearly nursing a hangover, judging by the bloodshot eyes, clammy skin, and the slight reek of stale liquor. Six months ago, Derick wouldn't have given a shit about how much Tom drank because he was right there next to the man, getting plastered.

  Back then, Tom was a casual drinker who knew how to put the bottle away. Something changed after the Ruthie left Sol but for the moment, Derick was more concerned about the quality of the booze Tom managed to find. Derick swore if he found out who was making the rotgut Tom was poisoning himself with, he'd flush the son of a bitch out of an airlock himself.

  “Good,” Tom nodded, deciding to leave it if Derick considered the matter closed. Besides, he caught the critical way Derick was looking at him. It didn't require any clairvoyance on Tom's part to know why. The look was all too familiar. Derick was worried about him and as much as Tom might hate admitting it, the kid had cause. A conversation for another day, he decided.

  “Right then, listen up!” Tom addressed everyone once they were a bit more relaxed, knowing there would be no repercussions for the earlier fight. “I just got word the Obelisk will be carrying half the rations it was going to. Seems the spoilage and the spread of supplies across the fleet is even worse than we thought.”

  An audible groan moved through the group. There would be hungry people on the Ruthie tonight. They would be angry, and the Sharks would be standing between them and what little food they were getting.

  Derick cursed inwardly, a slight exchange of eye contact told him the Major was just as angered by this as he.

  Glancing at his watch, Derick decided to shift their focus before they got too twisted up by a situation they could not change.

  “Alright! We're on deck in…. fifty-two minutes. Alpha squad, you're up! I want equipment check in thirty. Ozzy!” he yelled at the man he'd just reprimanded. “Act like a soldier and go find Jazz…”

  “No need Gunny, I'm here,” Jazz announced himself as he stepped into the room. He'd been returning anyway from his run and caught Derick's orders. “You heard Gunny! Get ready!”

  With Jazz barking orders at them, the crowd dispersed, scattering in various directions towards their billets. Derick spied the lithe body of Ren Richards following the crowd and spent a fraction of a second watching her crazy hair bounce off her shoulders. Glancing away quickly before he was caught, Derick frowned. He was her superior. He had to get over her. Dragging a hand through his hair, he turned back to Tom.

  “Any orders, Major?”

  His tone was formal but, in truth, they'd known each other for years and were best friends.

  “Yeah,” Tom nodded, taking a step closer to Derick and speaking in a lower tone. “Take Beta squad with you too. I think we both know how nasty this is going to get.”

  “That's a fucking understatement.”

  * * *

  Derick Rickman never intended to be a soldier.

  For as long as he could remember, he wanted to be a photojournalist. His dreams involved traveling Sol, taking pictures of important events and places, immortalising his experiences, frame by frame. An avid photographer in his youth, his collection ranged from modern holo-recorders to old fashioned film cameras and even video recorders. By the time he was ten, Derick mastered the use of all of them. Hell, he even had a vintage Browning he bought at an old junk store.

  Daniel Rickman, his father, was career military and so Derick could hone his craft with each new posting on a different moon or planet. It was a hobby his dad encouraged because, Derick suspected, Dad believed his middle son might be just a little too smart and sensitive for the military life.

  Derick's older brother, Chris, was the one who would follow in their father's footsteps. Born a year after Dan and Susannah's wedding, the couple decided to wait a few years before having more children. As a result, Derick was born four years later, Luke came three years after, and it was five years before Susannah got the girl she wanted in Lily.

  By the time Derick was two, Chris had hung the moon.

  Despite Chris indulging in his God-given right as an older brother to torment his younger siblings, he was never excessive or cruel. Charged to be the man of the house in their father's absence, Chris took the responsibility seriously. He looked after the younger children and helped their mother with chores.

  For Derick, Chris had been his best friend and his confidante. Even when Chris had friends of his own, he never failed to make room for Derick. If Chris's friends didn't like a kid trailing behind them, then Chris didn't have time for them.

  Unsurprisingly, Chris followed their father into the military, joining the Planetary Marines when he was old enough to enlist. Derick found it fitting. Chris was most like their father and it made sense that he would continue the family tradition. Derick was still in grade school, on an advanced track for college prep with an eye on every journalism scholarship he could find, when Chris left for boot camp.

  Six years later, a month after Derick's high school graduation, Chris was killed in an Earth First terrorist attack on Ganymede.

  While the others mourned Chris, Derick felt as if someone had dropped a nuke on his life, obliterating everything in its path. The enormity of it was more than he could bear and deconstructed everything Derick considered important to him. He gave up plans for college for a year with a half-hearted promise to go back later but never did. Instead, he lingered at home, consoling his father, who aged a decade after hearing the news, while trying to be there for his mother and siblings just like Chris would have done.

  Even after Dan decided to take a permanent post on Earth, Derick found it difficult to get his life back on track. Chris's loss was profound, and the void left behind seemed vast and permanent. As Derick approached his twentieth birthday, his cameras and photography equipment lay forgotten as he cut a swatch through the local girls and spent too much time in one bar or another. His goals were gone, and he had no idea what he intended to do with the rest of his life.

  His relationship with his father grew steadily tenser. Dan Rickman was always a hard man, one who saw no difference between soldiering and parenting. It was up to their mom and Chris to provide the emotional bedrock of their family. Dan's natural reaction to Derick's spiral was to take a hard-line approach, resulting in numerous screaming matches and even physical fights that ended up with Derick moving out of the house for a time.

  One night, while drinking at a bar somewhere on Claremont Boulevard outside Miramar, where Dad was posted, on his way to another post-Dan-Rickman-argument bender, he started talking to a stranger. The guy looked like a junkyard dog, tough and mean with an accent that was part Michael Caine and part Crocodile Dundee. A guy, who could hold his liquor a hell of a lot better than a twenty-year-old college dropout could.

  The drunker Derick got, the more he poured out his troubles to the stranger, who listened without comment. When Derick got through telling him about Chris and how his life had been upended by the loss, the man finally spoke.

  “So, you're going to piss your life away because your big brother died in the service? Fucking rotten way to remember him, isn't it?”

  Derick stared at him.

  “Well, no…” Derick stammered a response. He hadn't heard it put that bluntly before. The crux of every argument he had with Dan Rickman was not that he was throwing his life away but of how Derick wasn't Chris and would never measure up to him.

  “Look. You can spend your whole life crying about how he's gone but you got to remember one thing: he kicked it doing exactly what he wanted to do. Dying the way he did, with your men about you, in a fight, that's the way soldiers want to go. Fuck, that's how I want to go. I didn't sign up to die in a comfy bed, mate. I signed up to kick arse for something greater than myself, and I'm betting your brother did the same.”

  He was right.

  Chris spent his whole life taking care of him, Luke and Lily. Joining th
e military was simply extending his protective nature to the planet. Yeah, he probably didn't count on dying so early, but Derick could believe it was exactly how Chris would want to go. Dying for something that mattered, protecting the people he cared about. It was a watershed moment, the jolt of clarity he so desperately needed, and he started weeping as it washed over him.

  Instead of snorting in disgust at the appalling display, which was also a Dan Rickman special, the stranger patted him on the back and said quietly, “Get it out, mate. Get it out and let him go.”

  Sage advice from the man who would someday become his commanding officer and best friend.

  * * *

  “T- Minus thirty seconds and counting…”

  The large passageway just outside a smaller cargo bay was literally crammed full of people. Every square foot was taken up, with barely any shoulder room. Bodies, nerves, and sweat in a stuffy heat the air scrubbers weren't designed to handle. The effect would make anyone claustrophobic. On the other side of the thick doors, crew members were preparing to receive the rations via shuttle and prep them for distribution.

  Derick found a small crate in some supply closet and stood on it now, to give himself an elevated view of the crush of people lined up for their rations. With distribution run on a lottery system, chaos was barely threaded out by the presence of the Sharks. People picked up their rations in shifts, by the head of each household and their ID number. Zero's first, then ones, twos, so on and so forth. Each family would get enough rations for a week.

  They were lucky one of the agri-haulers survived the jump.

  Mostly, folks stayed orderly after a fashion. Derick made sure of it, even it meant being called things like 'Gestapo' and 'Pig'.

  “T-minus fifteen seconds…. ten….”

  The automated female voice sounded throughout the passageway, briefly silencing the low roar of the crowd. At least, until a voice carried over them, catching Derick's attention. From his viewpoint, he found the source easily. A large man with a slight gut and the sour look of one under duress. “Chu,” Derick said quietly into the throat mike. “On your ri…”

  “You're hurting me! Let go!!” Silence spread outward from the man as the crowd shifted and revealed a pretty, dark-haired, and exotic looking woman. The big man's hand was wrapped around her upper arm, nearly engulfing it. “You get your spic ass to the back of the line. You gotta wait your turn!” The man shoved the woman hard, making her stumble.

  “HEY!” Derick shouted, jumping off his crate. He started through the crowd as a path appeared with everyone suddenly finding the space to get out of the big and pissed off Shark's way. “Let her go!”

  “And what if I don't!?” Bubba or whatever his name was glowered at Derick sullenly. Easily Derick's height, no easy feat, and thirty pounds heavier, he seemed to be considering taking him on. “You gonna shoot me, you ass-RINE!?”

  A red bead of light appeared on the man's chest and Derick looked up from it with a smirk. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, towards Ren and her sniper perch. “No. But she will.”

  Bubba's chin hit his chest, eyes bulging at the bright red dot on his sternum.

  “Fucking pork rind haolie!!” The woman jerked her arm free from the man's grasp. “I'm Hawaiian, not Hispanic!”

  “You all look the same!”

  Someone behind them shouted. The woman cursed and swung a fist, but Chu grabbed her in time, twisting her away as she protested. Derick grabbed Bubba, preventing him from retaliating and that was all the crowd needed to ignite. They pressed in on Derick and Chu, shouting and yelling, flash boiling to a riot.

  “Stand down!!” Jazz yelled, freeing his nightstick when he lost sight of Gunny. “Beta! Crowd control right now!!” he ordered, yanking at the first body in his way to get to their gunnery sergeant.

  “QUIIIIIIET!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

  The command rolled over the crowd, echoing off the bulkheads and stunning all of them into silence, even the Sharks.

  The quiet left behind was like a vacuum, sucking every bit of fight out of the gathered refugees. Derick lunged to his feet, Bubba in hand as he sought the source of the noise. That had sounded like… yep. Derick grinned when he spotted Ren hanging up the intercom receiver near her position, looking at him smugly.

  Now that was fucking effective. 'NICE' he mouthed with a wink before turning back to his charge.

  “ID, name and billet,” he ordered as he yanked a chip reader from his harness.

  “Name's Jim Dale.” The big guy glowered as he produced his bright green wrist band. “Billet 261.”

  Derick scanned it and when the device chirped in positive affirmation, he glanced at the screen to verify the picture. “Mr Dale, once I authorize the delivery to continue, you will be given your rations and escorted off the deck.” Leaning in close, he grabbed the man's shoulder and dug his fingers into the flesh. “You have a problem with someone, you come to me. I catch you starting trouble again and your rations will be cut. Do you understand?” He growled.

  Jim's eyes widened. The threat was an effective one. He glanced around, taking in the hostile stares directed at him. He swore under his breath, as if realizing he would have been responsible for things going sideways. Taking a deep breath and letting it out, Jim nodded.

  “Good.” The shame on the man's face was enough for Derick to decide that further action wasn't needed. “Anderson!” When the private appeared beside Chu, Derick let go of Dale. “Private Anderson here will make sure you get your fair share and will be your escort.”

  Leaving Anderson to handle him, Derick turned to the woman and motioned for her hand. “ID.”

  Shoving back lank, dark hair, she held up the bright green band on her wrist. “My name is Lani Kahananui. I'm a teacher…”

  Fucking pork rind haolie was a teacher?? Where, a prison? Derick raised an eyebrow as he scanned her ID band.

  The noise no one was supposed to be making oozed up again as she continued, raising her voice to be heard. “I'm in charge of the unclaimed kids.” The crowd went silent again, staring at her when they realized exactly who she was. The unclaimed children were the poor kids separated from their families during the chaos of the mass evacuation. Lani had taken charge of them, sorting them out and organizing searches for family members.

  Derick scanned her ID band and was rewarded with another satisfactory chirp. “Richards!!” he called out and received a sharp 'Yes, Gunny!' by the red-headed sniper. “You and Mayday are Miss Kahananui's escorts today. Once she gets the rations, please escort her back to her assigned billet.”

  Still humming with satisfaction from the smile she received from him earlier, Ren made her way through the sea of human bodies, gesturing at Junior Corporal Maya 'Mayday' Sanjay, a former medic with the British Army, to join her at his call.

  “We're on it, Sir,” she quipped, always wearing the slightest hint of a smile for him.

  “Right behind you, mate,” Maya echoed.

  With the two civilians under trustworthy watch and the crowd under some semblance of control, Derick hopped back onto the crate and hailed Control to continue with the docking just as there was another shout.

  Seeking the source out, Derick sighed. It was going to be a long day.

  II

  Survey

  It was never wise to make hasty calculations even in the face of impending disaster.

  Just being off by a fraction may seem insignificant, but in astrophysics, it was the difference between life and death. Instead of emerging from the Ribbon a little over a light year away from their destination, they'd overshot their exit point by seven light years. A journey intended to take four weeks now stretched into its sixth month. Never in the history of the world, were there such grave consequences for not carrying a zero.

  Dr. Albert Nakamura stared at the faces before him, wishing it was anyone else but he who made it.

  No one blamed him, of course, not the inventor of the Ribbon Drive responsible for saving humanity. His original pr
ototype was being installed in a test flight ship given to him by his project funders, The Tiger Alliance (the federation of Asian nations). Albert had just been about to sign off on the installation when astronomers all over Sol flew into a panic.

  Something very large had hit the sun, something with enough reactive material to destabilise its solar fission. Every instrument they possessed showed the core of the sun collapsing on itself and when critical mass was reached, it would go nova taking the entire solar system with it. It would happen fast and no science they possessed could stop it.

  Extinction would happen, not in seven billion years, but in a matter of weeks.

  Suddenly Nakamura's drive went from being a prototype to humanity's last hope for survival. Frantically re-designing the device and increasing its output by a thousand, he worked around the clock to develop a working model while across the solar system, the evacuation lottery to choose several thousand people out of ten billion began.

  As luck would have it, critical mass arrived a week early. One final act of Murphy's Law.

  By that time, most of the people were already on board the ships and the military were on route to pick up final passengers. Nakamura made his calculations and rolled the dice, praying the Ribbon Drive would work as the solar system started to disintegrate and wipe out nearly ten billion people with it.

  It did and humanity achieved the ability to fold space.

  Twenty-five ships went through. For weeks before, smaller vessels not outfitted with a Ribbon drive had been leeched onto the larger ones with dry dock clamps and cables, like infant sharks pressed against their mother's belly. Of those twenty-five capital ships, twenty survived the gravimetric turbulence. Some of the older models, simply not made for such travel, broke up in transit. Nakamura tried not to think about the people on board who were lost. The drive's success was pyrrhic but at least they reached their destination on the far side of the spiral arm.