by S. H. Jucha
Terror’s singular mistake was crossing the path of the Spryte’s crew. Dingles, a spacer for thirty-two years, first serving under Captain Rose and then for Captain Cinders, was forced to retire when he developed space dementia. Jessie gave Dingles a generous retirement payout and paid the rent on a small cabin on the JOS for six months. It should have given Dingles plenty of time to find gainful employment.
Instead, Dingles burned through his funds in four months and never searched for new work or bothered with checking out retraining opportunities. Desperate, Dingles robbed a store owner, but, in disgust, he threw the coin vouchers back at the owner when he saw the man’s terrified expression.
Terror tracked Dingles down, gained access to his cabin with his security clearance, and accused him of robbery. The story was that Dingles yelled at Terror that he never took anything and tried to throw the corporal out of his cabin. That was all the excuse Terror needed. He used his shock stick repeatedly on the aging spacer, breaking Dingles nose, cracking a few ribs, and administering a host of bruises.
The JOS Review Board dismissed the robbery charges against Dingles, but gave him eighteen months incarceration for attacking a member of the security forces.
Unfortunately, for Dingles, his small, closed cell aggravated his dementia, but, as luck would have it, he was rescued soon afterwards.
Terror didn’t fare so well. Dingles, whom Jeremy replaced, was one of the finest navigators. With little course correction, he could put a ship within a few hundred meters of a captain’s requested destination, and the crews of the Marianne and Spryte loved him. They felt safe with Dingles plotting the courses.
One evening, after Terror ended his shift, he was using the maintenance passageways to return to his cabin, which was his habit. Suddenly, Terror felt a bag slip over his head from behind, and he was knocked to the deck and severely beaten. The attackers were careful not to strike his head, organs, or testicles, but they bruised half his body.
Terror was handed his comm unit to call for assistance. Before he could make his call, he heard a disguised voice whisper, “Leave spacers alone.” The hissing of an aerosol can and the chemical smell that followed the voice, told Terror that his attackers knew enough to eliminate any trace of DNA they’d left behind. There were no cams in the station’s maintenance passageways, so there was no record of the attack.
After slightly more than a half hour, the lieutenant and sergeant returned from searching the Spryte.
“The girl was here, Captain,” Devon said. “According to the DAD, she passed through the airlock, while your man was asleep, walked down the axis passageway, entered the wheel, and made her way to your cabin, and, apparently, came out the same way. My guess is she was searching for something. Don’t know whether she found it or not. You better check your cabin, Captain, and see if anything’s missing. The point is that somehow we’ve missed her. My guess is the girl exited the arm disguised as a spacer.”
“Lieutenant, that’s not probable. If you let me search, I’m sure I can find where’s she’s hiding,” Terrell insisted.
“Corporal McKenzie,” the sergeant said in a hard voice, “I can read the DAD as well as you, and your inference that we can’t is insubordinate. One more word out of you like that, and you’re going to find yourself on report.” The sergeant turned to follow his lieutenant and ordered Terrell to fall in.
Jessie could see the anger burning in Terror’s eyes. The corporal was transfixed, unable to follow his sergeant. Jessie broke the corporal’s contact with a snarky smile and a wave of his fingers. Terror threw him a rude hand sign and marched down the gangway.
That was stupid. Nothing says smart like antagonizing a sociopath, Jessie thought.
Jessie waited until the security team transited the ring via a cap to the JOS. Then he locked the outer and inner airlock hatches. He snatched a juice drink from the galley and settled himself on the bridge to watch. Jessie trusted Lieutenant Higgins. It was Terror who he suspected might double back, despite orders he might have received to the contrary.
After nearly an hour of monitoring, Jessie felt safe. He recycled his juice container in the galley, hurried to his cabin, and stripped off his coveralls. Once in the equipment room, Jessie traded his deck shoes for slip boots, donned his vac suit, shrugged on his backpack, attached the hoses to his helmet, and then locked it over his head. Once his gloves were on, Jessie ordered his suit, named Spryte, to turn on his mag-boots and run the integrity checks. He click-clacked his way to the hold where he had stowed Aurelia, his mag boots locking and releasing on the metal decking.
Jessie was worried for Aurelia. He’d placed a downsider in a vac suit and hid her in a dark bay. There was a high probability that she had panicked and hurt herself. He cycled through the airlock, signaled Spryte to turn on the helmet lights, and clumped his way over to the equipment locker.
Aurelia saw the light moving her way through the slots in the locker door. There was a moment of anxiety before she sensed Jessie’s worry for her. She was surprised to realize that she could feel his emotions through an airless environment.
When Jessie opened the locker, he was greeted by Aurelia’s radiant smile, visible through her faceplate.
“You needn’t have worried, Captain Cinders. I found this suit and the dark environment comforting. More precisely, I felt wonderfully isolated.”
Jessie was struck by the single purpose driving Aurelia. It wasn’t so much that she was fleeing a criminal act, which she was, but the young girl truly sought refuge, a place she could feel safe, once again.
“Well, time to come out of hiding, Aurelia … make that Rules, if you don’t mind. No use waving your real name around.”
“Rules is fine, Captain,” replied Aurelia, as she grasped Jessie’s gloved hand and emerged from the equipment locker.
They made their way to the vac suit storage room — doffed the gear, kept the skins, and added deck shoes, after which Jessie led the way to the gravity wheel.
“Captain, you provided these machinations to evade your security’s sniffer, didn’t you?” Aurelia asked. She smiled when she saw Jessie frown at her. “Don’t look so surprised, Captain. My mother discovered when my sister and I were young that servants wouldn’t speak around her but would chat happily in our presence. We became our mother’s intelligence sources.”
“It sounds as if your mother prepared you well for your flight.”
“As best she could, I think,” Aurelia replied. She dismissed thoughts of her family to focus on the question that had formed in her mind. “Captain, how do you suppose your security was able to use sniffers to try to locate me?”
Jessie started to explain the concept of a DNA-database and the secure means by which sniffers received that information and compared the profiles to the samples taken in by the devices when testing. Most important, the operator had no access to the profile information, at any time. But, despite Aurelia’s youthful face, her eyes locked intensely with his, and Jessie paused to explore her question in depth.
“The commandant said this morning that security hadn’t received any more details on you, other than your photo and the charge of murder,” Jessie said. He had stopped by the galley and heated up a meal for Aurelia. Her stomach had grumbled several times, while they stripped out of the vac suits. They sat at a small table, and Aurelia dug into the food and drink on her tray. “I would presume the governor was the one who sent your DNA profile to the commandant.”
“Don’t presume that, Captain,” Aurelia replied around a mouthful of food.
“Who else?” Jessie asked.
“According to the servants, there are many important families in the domes who would love to see Markos Andropov removed as governor.”
“But, these people would need access to your DNA.”
“My mother always said that coin is the lubricant of the domes, which I had always thought was funny when I was little. As far as I knew, the domes didn’t move, which is why I wondered why they would
need greasing.”
“You believe that someone in the governor’s household supplied one of these families with your sample.”
“Not someone, Captain … Giorgio Sestos, my father’s head of security. He might have done it with or without the governor’s approval.” Aurelia finished the drink and regarded Jessie. “You have an intense dislike for the governor. Why?”
“Don’t …” Jessie warned, holding up a finger to stop her.
“Captain, you haven’t shared much time in the company of an empath, have you?”
“Not if I could help it.”
“Interesting response, but I wasn’t referring to your personal preferences concerning empaths, I was speaking of your knowledge of how we work. When I mentioned the governor’s name, you broadcasted strong emotions. They were dark and angry, and those feelings are like a wave passing through me. I can hardly ignore them.”
“Sorry, Rules, I didn’t mean to infer anything about you by my comment.”
“No need to apologize, Captain. I know my capabilities frighten people, and, now that I’ve killed someone with my powers, they frighten me.”
“Well, I need to get you out of sight, while I figure out what to say to my crew, before they return from downtime.”
“Speaking of your crew, Captain, I hope you won’t be too harsh with your man who was guarding the entrance to your ship.”
“You mean Buttons in the airlock?”
“Buttons, a colorful name for a kind man,” Aurelia said. “He was awake when I peeked in the doorway to your ship. I hung on the rails above to be close without being seen, and I put him to sleep.”
“You can put someone to sleep?” Jessie asked. A small thread of fear crawled up his spine.
“As I said, my powers are scary,” Aurelia replied.
Jessie realized his apprehension was broadcasting, and he was angry with himself. Everything Aurelia had told him indicated that she was a young girl who had been victimized and was seeking shelter. She didn’t deserve his innate, biased reactions.
“To answer your question, Captain: I can’t put people to sleep directly, but I can make them feel warm and safe. It eventually leads to the same result. I’ve done this hundreds of times for Sasha. She hated being confined to the house, unable to join the world we witnessed from our window.”
Jessie and Aurelia talked until she inadvertently yawned in his face, and he took her to his cabin to get some sleep. He chose to wait on the bridge for the crew to arrive. Later, Buttons came to the bow, apologized to him, and said he was ready to return to airlock duty.
“No need, Buttons. Do me a favor, and check the vac suit tanks. Some of them might need topping off.”
“You want a list of the crew who failed to recharge?” Buttons asked, knowing it was SOP to refill tanks immediately after use.
“That’s not necessary either, Buttons. The reason will be made clear, later.”
“Aye, Captain,” Buttons replied, touching a finger to the brim of his cap, which was plastered with small, metal, coat and shirt buttons that he’d collected.
Jessie waited in his captain’s chair. He knew his second mate, Ituau Tulafono, would collect the crew and bodily haul them back to the ship, if necessary, to meet his deadline. With everything going on, the scuttlebutt concerning security’s search would reach the spacers, and they’d probably choose to return early.
Thinking of Ituau made Jessie smile. Many people recommended that he not hire her. She was a bruiser, a brawler, they said, undisciplined and unmanageable. But that wasn’t who Jessie saw when he interviewed her. Yes, she was a known carouser, who drank hard, enjoyed her stims, and chose her partners freely. But the heavy-built, Samoan woman, with brown skin and a shaved head, who sat before Jessie for their first meeting was composed, a no-nonsense spacer.
“You were put stationside from your last position as second mate, Ituau. Care to explain?” Jessie had asked her.
“The report will say, Captain Cinders, that I was insubordinate to the first mate,” Ituau replied.
“Actually, it said that you decked him and then you were insubordinate,” Jessie said.
“I choose who I sleep with and when, Captain. No man should be foolish enough to force me, or I’ll disabuse him of that notion.”
“It’s a good thing you’re not my type,” Jessie said.
“I’m every man’s type, at one time or another,” Ituau wisecracked.
“You interested in crewing for me?” Jessie asked.
“Yes, Captain Cinders, it would be a privilege. I’ll take any position you have, and I’ll work my way up.”
“Your fitness reports prior to the incident with the first mate were excellent, Ituau. My first mate is retiring. You interested in the job?”
Ituau’s broad face had split into a grin, and she’d offered her hand in the spacer’s clasp. Jessie had gripped her hand, thinking he’d grabbed deck steel, and Ituau had smacked her other hand over his. The sting took a while to fade, but his decision that day had stood the test of time.
There was a little shaking out of the crew, who were keenly aware of Ituau’s reputation during downtime. Jessie knew of only two crew members, who had made the mistake of thinking their liaison with Ituau, while on station, meant they had special privileges when back aboard ship. One young spacer was corrected with a quick smack upside the head and a few stinging remarks when his hand strayed to Ituau’s prominent breast, while they were in the galley.
Jessie’s hard-nosed second mate, Nate Mikado, decided he could push the issue, figuring Ituau would succumb to his amorous attentions. When that didn’t work, the problem landed on Jessie’s table. He gave them two choices. Both could be put on station, or they could settle the dispute in any manner they chose. They elected the latter choice, and Jessie officiated at the bout. Nate was outmassed by a good number of kilos, but he was confident he could take a woman. In fact, he was downright haughty about it.
Time came and the combatants covered their hands in safety gauze. Then the fight started. It quickly became clear to Jessie that he should have had the two fighters wrap their elbows, knees, and, perhaps, even their teeth.
The bout wasn’t a pugilistic display of skills. It was a dirty, no-holds-barred, knockdown, drag-out attempt on each party’s part to win. Jessie was ready to call a halt to the fight when Ituau caught Nate in the solar plexus with a knee by grabbing his shoulders and leaping into the air to deliver the blow to her taller adversary. It knocked the fight out of the second mate, who lay on the deck, sucking for air, and holding a hand up in submission.
Ituau raised both hands in the air in celebration of her win, but it was short-lived, as Jessie ordered Ituau to help Nate up.
“Crew, disperse,” Jessie had ordered, “and you two, clean up this deck, and I mean spotless. I don’t want security sniffers detecting a drop of blood. Then clean yourselves up before you go to medical. You’ll have to drop some coin to ensure they don’t report you. Make it an even split on the coin. Do you read me?”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” had been the responses.
Jessie would have been interested to catch a brief part of their conversation, as the paired transited to the station.
Nate had said, “I could have taken you in a few more minutes, if you hadn’t got that lucky shot in with your knee.”
Ituau replied, “In your dreams, boy. You’re a good lay but a terrible fighter.”
-6-
Crew’s Decision
Jessie woke to the bridge monitor’s soft chime, indicating the ship’s access code was being entered at the outer airlock hatch. The arm cam showed the tail end of a line of crew who were waiting for the hatch to be opened. Jessie waited for the inner airlock hatch to be accessed before he walked down to the axis passageway to meet the crew.
“Follow me, everyone,” Jessie ordered and led the way to the wheel’s galley. “Someone, at the rear, fetch Buttons and bring him here too.”
When the crew was crowded into th
e small space, Jessie spared a moment to regard his people. They were a good group of men and women, and he wondered if he had the right to ask them to risk their careers and possibly their freedom.
“A huge problem has just been laid in my lap, and, if I’m not careful, it will affect my company and this crew,” Jessie started. “I suppose you’ve picked up on-station chatter about the excitement.”
“Yeah, Captain, security is trolling the station,” Nate, the second mate, replied. “Story is that some girlie is on the loose in the JOS, and they’re trying to return the goodtimer downside.”
“Not even close,” Jessie commented. “The girl is a downsider, and she’s wanted for murder.”
“How does this concern you or us, Captain?” Ituau asked, suddenly alarmed by the captain’s opening comment.
“The girl transited out of the JOS onto this arm, snuck past Buttons, and hid in my wardroom closet,” Jessie replied.
The crew turned hard eyes on Buttons.
“Don’t blame Buttons,” Jessie said firmly. “Our downside escapee put him to sleep.”
Buttons mouth dropped open. On the one hand, he was happy to know he hadn’t been derelict in his duty. On the other hand, he had no idea how the girl might have drugged him.
“Where’s she now, Captain?” Ituau asked.
“Asleep in my cabin,” Jessie replied.
“Captain, how did she put me to sleep?” Buttons asked.
“Buttons, the girl, who’s called Aurelia, but who we will call Rules, is an empath and a strong one.” Jessie had nearly said Rules was an extremely strong empath, but, judging by the crew’s mixed reactions, which leaned toward unfavorable, he was glad he hadn’t.
The well-to-do, who had the coin, sought out the Belle’s empaths to ease their fears, concerns, regrets, and all manner of mental torments, but most common people had a distrust of the sensitives, whom they had little contact with and, therefore, didn’t understand.
