Interim: On the run from the Galactic FTL Police

by P. K. Lentz

  As quickly as it had hardened, the steel melted. The girl collapsed fully into his lap. Her still-open eyes grew dead and lusterless.

  “Lisset?” Kearn called. Then twice more to no reply. With a sigh he sank back in the couch and shifted her inert form in his lap.

  He didn’t quite know yet what to make of what she’d said. Maybe someday it would start to make sense. Or better yet, with her final passing--if indeed that was what he’d just seen--none of it would matter anymore. She had said something was over. Maybe it was her ‘war.’

  But just what did that mean? She’d warned that her conflict threatened to consume this layer, like it had many others. Worlds were right now being consumed, one by one, in Fleet’s vicious cleansing campaign, but was this the destruction she meant? Would Freedom’s Reign now come to an abrupt end?

  That seemed hard to imagine, so perfectly suited was that course of action to the nature of the Interim. In retrospect it was perhaps the only possible outcome. And why should Fleet reverse its natural course only because some unseen battle had raged to its conclusion? Lisset and her enemies, whoever those were, could hardly be responsible for mankind’s every wicked impulse.

  No, Kearn suspected--Lisset had meant something else, some devastation on a far more massive and permanent scale than even the rampage on which Fleet had embarked. Humans were pawns to Lisset and to her adversary, not prizes, and they played no role in the battles that truly mattered, the battles that had ended in defeat for one self-described exile.

  So much remained unclear. Had Lisset been humanity’s champion or its bane? Would anything have been better, or even different, without her ‘influence,’ or had she won instead of lost? Only the corpse in Kearn’s arms could say, and even if she could speak she probably wouldn’t.

  Judging from her apparent track record, though, Lisset was no champion. Maybe even to believe in champions, human or otherwise, was hopelessly naïve. Even the Interim considered its actions righteous. Whether or not those actions were significant on any cosmic scale, the damage they caused and the chaos they left behind did matter. It mattered to mere humans. Lives had been erased, with many more likely to follow. Maybe one of Lady’s own was among them. And just as the Fleet crews who obliterated unsuspecting innocents in their billions did so at the direction of their captains and not of gods, so was there only one party responsible if Aprile were to die.

  So why didn’t he feel anything? Shame, guilt, fear--anything at all. Maybe, strangely enough, the very scale of events eased his mind. What could possibly be worth worrying about here at the End of History, when human lives, plans, desires, accomplishments, all amounted to precisely nothing? Or maybe he just hadn’t fully accepted it all yet. Maybe this was just too big to be real to him.

  But, End of Everything or not, Kearn was still a captain, and one with a crew in danger. Powerless as he might be, there wasn’t any good excuse for sitting here with a dead body slowly decomposing on his chest.

  Shrugging the girl’s inert form aside, Kearn rose and emerged from the guest quarters into an empty hall. A quick comm to Thorien confirmed that Zerouali was stable and soon to recover. Kearn’s next comm, to the bridge, confirmed there had yet been no contact with Aprile or the assassins. “Keep trying,” he said.

  And that command began and ended what was in Kearn’s power to do. Even were he willing to break orbit without giving Aprile every chance to return, Lady wouldn’t get far without replenishing its antimatter chambers. And the ones who manned the platform on the far side of Ona’s host gas giant weren’t likely to fork it over simply because their civilization may or may not be nearing extinction.

  A comm from the bridge several seconds later removed the uncertainty from that last proposition.

  “Captain, unidentified objects detected on course for planetfall on Ona.”

  Warheads. Little doubt of it.

  “ETA?” Kearn asked urgently, halting in his tracks.

  “Eight minutes.”

  “Still no word from Aprile?”

  “Negative, Captain.”

  Kearn braced both palms against the wall and hung his head. He hadn’t exactly been hopeful about Aprile’s chances – already he struggled not to think of her in past tense--but confirmation, complete with a countdown, hit hard nonetheless.

  “Any danger to Lady?” Kearn returned eventually.

  “Negative.”

  “Sign of Whisper or Fleet presence?”

  “Negative.”

  “Maintain current disposition. Kearn out.”

  Severing the link, Kearn engaged total comm silence. So much for trying to be a captain again. It looked as if there really was nothing to do now but sit and wait for whatever end might come.

  ***

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  If Aprile was to die because of him, the least Kearn could do was watch. A quick reversal of his course through the hab module brought him to a darkened chamber, the primary use of which until recently had been to impress pretty groundsider girls out of their clothing.

  Girls like Mela. Kearn thought of that girl now, blissfully ignorant in hibe. Was her home, Merada, among those slated for extermination? Probably, if Fleet’s recent humiliation there was a factor. In which case, his stubborn refusal to send Mela back there had saved her life.

  And Lady’s holds were filled with hundreds more like her who would likewise awaken to find homeworlds and destinations exterminated. It would be for time and history to decide which fate was worse, to live or to die.

  The chamber’s floor-wide vidscreen lit with pinpricks of starlight. Kearn cued up the best available view of Ona and sprawled on the floor near the chamber’s center. In a matter of minutes he would watch from the safety of orbit while billions far below lost their lives.

  A wide arc of Ona filled the floor beneath him. It was not a particularly pretty world. Neither was its civilization, by any standard. But such observations offered no consolation whatever to those unlucky souls soon to perish without ever knowing why. Not long ago, a different Kearn--or Will Gareth, if he chose to believe his own lies--might have said that the destruction of a dead-end like Ona would be no big loss to the universe. He would never say that now, and not only because his friend was down there.

  Kearn waited four minutes in silence for a world to end.

  It came in a single bright flash that lit Ona’s atmosphere. Then another and another. The blossoms swelled into expanding discs of light, the edges of which crept silently, relentlessly outward to meet and fuse with one another. Seen from high above, Ona’s ‘cleansing’ was silent and deceptively beautiful.

  Kearn settled face-down on the screen with forehead resting on the back of one hand. The chamber’s design made it seem as if nothing at all lay between him and the megadeath below. He felt vaguely that he should shed tears for Ona, but none came. Minutes passed. The lights on Ona faded and dissolved, and when they vanished its surface looked much the same as it had before. From on high, anyway. For those few that might survive to witness the results at closer range, no doubt it was horror beyond reckoning.

  Kearn remained there, silent, for the better part of an hour, feeling like a ghost hovering above and outside of reality, a detached observer. Twice he ignored comms from Lady’s crew, speaking only to insist he be left alone. They could say nothing that mattered. They were all ghosts on a ship of ghosts. Maybe they weren’t dead yet, but they would be soon enough.

  Some time later the chamber’s entrance hissed open, flooding the black room with light and spoiling Kearn’s view. When darkness returned an instant later he sensed another presence with him in the room. The air current from the entrance carried the scent of the newcomer’s groundsider hair. Zerouali.

  “I had your engineer override the lock,” she said solemnly. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  Kearn remained face down on the screen. “No.”

  The answer was an honest one, for he was relieved to find that Zerouali was his visitor and not any other
. With her insight into Lisset and translight, she seemed about the only one who belonged in his nightmarish new version of reality.

  “I’m glad you’re okay,” Kearn offered distractedly.

  “Thanks.”

  Zerouali came forward to join him at the room’s center. They exchanged no further words as she took a position beside him on the floor. Though Kearn didn’t look up to confirm, he sensed that her gaze, like his, was on the deceptively calm surface of Ona. In here, one could hardly avoid it.

  After a long silence in which Kearn found himself increasingly aware of her presence, Zerouali finally spoke again.

  “It’s amazing,” she said. “Not the death, of course, but the view from up here. I never get used it. It makes one feel like a god.”

  “I don’t feel like a god,” Kearn said. “Far from it.”

  “A spirit, then. Powerless to interfere.”

  The familiarity of the sentiment lightened Kearn’s black mood, if just a shade. “You read my mind,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re some kind of superhuman entity too.”

  “No,” she said. “Just human, for better or worse.”

  “Worse, probably.”

  “Given the circumstances I won’t take that as an insult.”

  Kearn permitted himself a single, halfhearted laugh.

  After another quite long silence, Zerouali asked, “Do you come here often?”

  “Better place than any to count stars.”

  “I’ve heard you do more than that in here.”

  Kearn gave another light laugh. This one, though, masked pain. “You sound like Aprile,” he said--and with the sound of her name came Kearn’s first real pang of sorrow over her loss. The first of many to come, no doubt. For now he suppressed it. “Counting stars is a spacer term,” he explained. “It’s not literal.”

  “I know.”

  “You know so much about me,” Kearn said, glad for the opportunity to steer the conversation away from himself. “And I still know almost nothing about you.”

  “I suppose that makes two of us.”

  When Zerouali didn’t offer any elaboration, Kearn elected to pry. “What do you mean?”

  Her answer came hesitantly. “Let’s just say I’ve spent so long playing a role that I may have lost track of who I really am.”

  Shifting onto his side, Kearn saw Zerouali now for the first time since she’d entered. He found that the woman who sat with him in Ona’s dying glow was not the same Jilan Zerouali who’d come aboard at Merada with her too-clever speech, unreadable expression and cool detachment. Back then he could hardly spend five minutes in a room with her without itching to leave. Now he didn’t feel like leaving at all.

  An awkward silence ensued in which Kearn felt something he’d rarely, if ever, felt while alone with a woman.

  He was unsure of himself.

  The only consolation was that Zerouali seemed equally uncertain. Her eyes met his once or twice, but spent more time watching her own hand trace invisible patterns on the floor. Kearn found himself watching that hand, too.

  Precious little these days seemed familiar to Kearn, but he surrendered now to a familiar impulse. He reached out and set his hand atop hers.

  Zerouali froze, and her deep brown eyes fixed on his. The only thing immediately discernable there was a flash of mild surprise. Her gaze quickly lowered to the point of contact between them, their hands. She turned her palm upward and let their fingers interlock. The other hand rose and moved toward Kearn’s cheek. But it stopped just shy of contact, retreating with fingers curled in a loose fist. She hung her head.

  “A planet was just murdered,” she said.

  Kearn looked back down at the calm grey expanse of dead Ona. “I know,” he said. “I watched it.”

  Disengaging her hand from Kearn’s, Zerouali clasped her knees in an upright fetal ball. “You were right.” Her penitent tone came as sharp contrast to anything Kearn had come to expect from her. “I should have fought, should have used what I knew to destroy them.”

  “Nothing would have changed,” Kearn said, shifting his body to bring himself alongside her. “One person can’t topple an empire. Neither can two.”

  “They can try.”

  “And they can die.”

  With a blank-faced nod, Zerouali said, “If necessary.”

  “Of the two of us, I’m the one who really could have screwed them. But what would I have done? Destroyed Reissa? Verond? The whole Commonwealth?”

  “Maybe that would have been for the best. Or maybe if you and I had met a century ago we might have accomplished something. The only certain thing now is that we’ll never know.”

  “No, we won’t know,” Kearn conceded. “But I do know that we’re alive and we have to look ahead now. Even if what we see isn’t pretty.” Funny how he was offering her encouragement when he himself had just been all but ready to give in.

  Evidently that irony did not escape Zerouali, who breathed a melancholy laugh. “This from a captain who locks himself away at the first hint of trouble.”

  Had the old Zerouali, the one Will Gareth had met at Merada, made such a remark, he certainly would have taken offense. Now Kearn laughed along with her at his own expense.

  “Never too late to change, I guess,” he said.

  “It’s too late for Ona. And many others.”

  The grim reminder cast the room once more into a deep silence that befitted the planetscape beneath.

  It was Zerouali who broke it. “You’re right, Captain,” she said. “Whether we deserve it or not, we’re alive and have the luxury of learning from past mistakes.”

  Kearn nodded, agreeing with the sentiment even while unsure if she was correct in attributing the thought to him. Just what mistakes did she have in mind?

  Zerouali didn’t return his look, but instead stared squarely out over the knees she clutched against her chest. A hint of motion drew Kearn’s gaze downward to where her hand had begun a controlled descent of her calf. Reaching the floor it proceeded purposefully across the sliver of Ona that separated them.

  About halfway to Kearn, it stopped. Was this an invitation? Instinct told him it could hardly be otherwise. Then again, with her...

  Casting doubt aside, Kearn surrendered to instinct and dispatched a hand toward hers for the second time in this encounter.

  Centimeters before contact, Zerouali drew back. Too slow for a real retreat, Kearn noted. He continued his advance.

  Once more she pulled back just before contact. Kearn’s hand stalked hers to its new position very near her body. Any farther and he’d have to lean forward bodily to catch it. A glance up to Zerouali’s face found dark eyes still firmly on her knees.

  Predictably, her hand slipped away again, this time retreating completely out of reach into the small empty space under her folded legs. Too far into the pursuit to give up, even if he’d wanted to, Kearn dispatched his whole body forward behind his now outstretched arm.

  His hand passed under Zerouali’s legs and reached its now stationary target. Even now, with their faces separated by little more than a thin slice of their combined warmth, Zerouali declined to look at Kearn.

  “I’m not good at giving signals,” she said. “Whatever those are.”

  “That was pretty good.”

  Kearn leaned closer, and was glad when Zerouali did not retreat. Their cheeks touched. Her soft lips brushed his jaw, setting hairs there on end. They lingered this way for long seconds, knowing there was but one place to go from here. Maybe Zerouali had reservations, or maybe she was simply savoring the touch. For his part, Kearn’s heart raced and stomach churned. He wanted very much to proceed, but, strangely, nothing in his considerable experience seemed to apply.

  He was not left long to ponder the subject, for Jilan Zerouali’s lips finally skirted the line of his jaw and swept up to meet his. He returned the kiss, and they lowered as one to the floor.

  Some time later they lay naked, Zerouali’s head on Kearn’s shoulder, a rav
aged world beneath their sweaty backs. The comfortable silence that had persisted during and since their lovemaking dragged out and threatened to become awkward.

  “Tell me,” Kearn finally ventured. “Did that really just happen?”

  Zerouali exhaled a lazy sigh. “I’m afraid so.”

  “Afraid?”

  No answer. Kearn had intended the question lightheartedly, but perhaps it had been a touch too personal. Even if Zerouali had allowed him inside her walls, so to speak, naturally such an invitation was not without limit. He hurriedly changed the subject.

  “You were Interim,” he said. “That means you have neurilace.”

  Her simple answer came, thankfully, without sign of offense. “Of course.”

  “What’s it like?”

  It took her a while to come up with, “Helpful.”

  “It was ages before I even worked up the nerve to get comm implants,” Kearn confessed. “But I hear the lace can...enhance things.”

  Zerouali’s tone indicated that she grasped his meaning. “They can,” she said. “In fact there are plenty of men and women who have enhanced themselves right into varying degrees of catatonia.”

  “So, just now, did you--”

  “No!”

  “Have you?”

  Zerouali patted Kearn’s bare chest. “That will have to wait until we’re on a first name basis, Captain.”

  So here was a more gentle deployment of her formidable defenses.

  “And when might that be,” Kearn asked, “if not now?”

  “That depends.”

  “On?”

  “On how long we live.”

  “I see. Wouldn’t want to get too comfortable right before a Fleet warship blows us away.”

  “Actually I was thinking the opposite. Feel free to ask me anything once the warheads are locked on.”

  As was frequently the case, Kearn had trouble telling just how seriously Zerouali intended her words to be taken. He felt outclassed, as if she could talk circles around him.

  “And if there aren’t any warheads?” he asked, mostly just to avoid a deeper silence. For all he knew, they could be having two separate conversations.