by J. R. Mabry
She emerged from the door and stepped down to the floor of the bay. Steadying herself against the hull, she turned and began walking across the cavernous bay floor. Then she stopped.
Weaponer Shallit had come to meet her. That was odd. Odder still was the fact that he was accompanied by a double complement of security officers. As her own security detail disembarked, they noted the oddity of it, too, and halted behind her. Dr. Mbusa simply pushed past them and headed for the lift.
“What’s up?” Leif Arnesson asked.
“Weaponer Shallit, what’s wrong?” Jo asked. “Why aren’t you on the bridge?” She felt the tiny black hairs on the back of her neck become stiff and stand upright. A chill ran down her spine.
“This crew is in a state of crisis,” Shallit said. “Morale is low—people are scared.”
“There’s no need for them to—”
Shallit interrupted her. “Confidence in leadership is low. For the good of the crew, for its survival, I am relieving you of your command.”
So that was it. Why hadn’t she seen this coming? She put her hands on her hips defiantly. “You don’t have the authority to relieve me of command.”
“I don’t need authority, I only need strength and the confidence of the crew.”
Jo glanced at the hard faces of the security officers—her security officers. “You mean the confidence of Security.”
He moved his head back and forth, indicating a flake of agreement. “They do the job.”
“This is mutiny. It will never stand.”
“Possession is 9/10ths of the law. When we complete this mission and return safely, no one will blink an eye.”
That was probably not true, but there was enough truth in it to make Jo nervous. The Revolutionary Freedom Coalition was well funded, but chaotic. There was a command structure, but there was an anarchic streak that made precise coordination of forces difficult at best. If he could gin up a good enough story, he might just get away with it. Or he was planning a career in piracy with a stolen vessel and crew. Jo wouldn’t put it past him.
“This is wrong, Greg.”
“You’re going to appeal to my morality now?” He lowered his head slightly and gave her a smile that said, Aren’t you pathetic?
Jo felt herself running out of aces. Her mind raced. It was stupid, her appeal to ethics. A man like Shallit only spoke the language of pragmatism. Idealism was an alien tongue.
“Throw down your weapon,” Shallit ordered. “You, men, with me.” He motioned for the security detail that had returned from the planet to abandon her and join their fellows. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see them wavering. But they could read the score as well as she could. They’d either cross over or surrender their weapons with her. Slowly, reluctantly, they stepped past her. Arnesson glanced over his shoulder and shot her an apologetic grimace.
She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. If she was going to go down, it was going to be with some dignity.
“Your blaster, commander,” Shallit insisted. “Throw it down.”
“I’m not going to throw it down,” she said. “It’ll get damaged. Hell, it might explode. Here.” She removed her blaster from its holster and flipped it around. She held it out so that its handgrip was pointed toward Shallit.
He nodded and strode forward to take the weapon.
She held it out to him. Holding it as she was, her thumb was nowhere near the ID pad. Just as he reached out to take the weapon, she pushed the trigger forward with her thumb.
The particle blast erupted from the butt-end of the barrel, and it was close enough to catch Shallit full in the chest. The man went down, howling with pain and rage. Jo flipped the blaster into the air and caught it the right way ’round, placing her thumb on the ID pad as God had intended so that this time the gun would know its owner—would know it was her—and would fire properly and at full, hull-melting capacity. She trained the blaster at Shallit’s head as he clutched at his chest and writhed. “Nice try, asshole.” She glanced up at the assembled security teams. “You’ve all got two choices. Behave like loyal RFC Security from this moment out and we’ll forget any of this ever happened. Continue to back this asshole and you can join him for a tea party in the airlock until your guts explode out the top of your head. Which will it be?”
She watched as, one by one, they holstered their blasters and saluted.
“Grab this asshole and take him to that airlock.” She pointed to the one across the room.
No one complained. No one objected. They dragged his twisting body across the landing bay floor to the airlock and waited as it slid open, then shoved him in.
She stabbed a button with her finger and stepped back slightly as the inner hatch slid closed and sealed. Jo’s demeanor was like steel as she entered the executive code overriding decompression, then watched through the small porthole in the hatch as Shallit’s body was blown into the void.
“Come.”
Jeff’s and Emma’s eyes locked. She smiled encouragingly.
He’d slept some and his headache had abated, thanks to a gallon of Elektro and some Morphex. He felt slightly altered—and maybe a tiny bit still drunk—but he was alert and functional. He waited as the door slid open, and motioned for Emma to enter first. He followed her into a wood paneled office adorned with nautical tchotchkes and antique lithographs of jazz musicians.
Admiral Tal looked up from the pad in his hand only when they were halfway across the room. He didn’t smile exactly, but gave a satisfied nod. He was older than when Jeff had seen him last. His dark brown skin was more weathered, and his hair had grayed. He seemed to be the same Admiral Tal in every respect, except Jeff knew he wasn’t.
“Captain. Doctor. Please have a seat.” They did. Jeff felt a fleeting wave of nervousness. He flashed on being in the principal’s office as a teenager. He knew it was a silly thought, but knowing that didn’t make the feeling go away.
“You’ve come to us with quite a tale,” he said. He sat. “Can I offer you a drink?”
“No thank you,” Emma answered for both of them, a little too quickly. “Especially not him.”
A slight curl of a smile crossed the Admiral’s face, but it disappeared quickly. He leaned back in his chair. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, Captain.”
“Since I died twenty years ago, I suppose that’s true. I’ve seen you since…in our universe. But it has been a long time.”
“Are you still holding a grudge?” Tal asked.
“Why should I? In my universe, you picked me.”
“Did I?” Tal nodded slowly. “Well, it was a close thing.” He drummed his fingers on his desk. “I have to confess, I find your story almost impossible to believe.”
Emma gave no reaction. Jeff nodded. “I understand completely.”
“You look like Commander Bowers to me. You’re older, but I’d know you anywhere. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect you were haunting me. An admiral has to live with the ghosts of all the men he sent into battle who didn’t come back. We just don’t often have to confront them in the flesh.”
Jeff nodded. He swallowed. He could see the Admiral was struggling with this. There was nothing he could do but let him struggle. “You could be a plant, a trick. But the fact is that you know things that only Captain Hightower and the original Commander Bowers could know. So that’s…convincing.” He turned to look at Emma. “And there’s the odd fact that there are now two of you. You are teaching particle physics at MIT. Right now.” The air over his desk shimmered and a moment later a tiny version of Emma was lecturing on the admiral’s desktop. “Specialist in Quantum seismology.”
“Guilty as charged,” Emma said. “Admiral, can I ask a frivolous question? Am I…single?”
Tal chuckled. “I did not think to ask, my dear.”
Emma shrugged.
“Needless to say, we’re interested to hear about what you all were working on, when the whole…”
“Accident?” Jeff
offered, hating himself for saying it.
“Yes, when the accident happened.”
“I’d be happy to write up a technical evaluation,” Emma offered. “I was the one supervising the technical operation.”
Tal nodded. “Good, because we want to know what you were really up to.”
Jeff and Emma looked at one another.
“What do you mean, ‘really up to’?” Jeff asked.
“I’ve just received a report from our experts evaluating your voice and vid records ever since you returned—specifically your initial debriefing. Not a single man on your ship was telling the truth—not the whole truth, anyway. And that includes you, Captain.”
Jeff nodded. “I guess that’s why we asked to see you.”
“I can’t tell you how glad I am that you asked to see me before I summoned you. It was a close thing.” He folded his hands in front of him and leaned over his desk toward Jeff. “Are you gonna come clean with me, Captain, Doctor, or are you going to spin some more gold out of your asses?”
“You want the whole truth?” Jeff asked.
“I do, Captain. Knowing the whole situation is the only way you win a war. It’s the only way I can keep these people safe. So you can either give it to me straight or you can continue your depressive funk in a maximum security cell.”
Jeff glanced at Emma. She nodded. “Okay. The whole truth, then.”
“I’m going to be recording this. So we can tell if you’re telling the truth.”
“That’s fine, sir.” Jeff launched in. He told the admiral about Catskill, about the mysterious, suicidal commands, and about Danny’s death. He told the admiral about New Manila being dismantled by the Prox, about his crash landing on the moon, and about the Ulim.
The admiral blinked as Jeff related all he knew about the crystalline aliens, about how he’d been reconstructed back home in Anchorage. About how he’d seen them squash space and how he’d learned to do it himself. He told Tal about their early experiments, about the facility in Alberta, about the yak meat in Ladakh, about the disaster with the Bohr. Finally, he related the surprise attack of the Ulim and the desperate jump Jeff had initiated that had apparently wiped out an entire string of reality and landed them in a familiar but alien universe.
When he finally finished speaking, Tal’s eyes were wide. “I…need that drink.” He did not ask again whether Jeff or Emma would join him. Tal opened a drawer and poured himself a glass. He knocked it back.
Jeff blinked, waiting. Tal wiped the corner of his mouth on his sleeve. Then he propped one elbow on the desk and rested his chin in his hand. “So you’re…actually an alien.”
“I don’t know what I am. I’m me, though,” Jeff answered.
Tal sighed. “You’re sure none of these…Prox…made the jump with you?” Jeff knew what he was after. The admiral did not need another enemy to contend with, not with a civil war raging.
“No, sir. We would have picked that up on our sensors. We came through alone.”
Tal nodded.
“Good…that’s…good.” Tal nodded again. “Um…Captain, Doctor, I’m going to need some time to…”
“Process?” Emma offered.
“I was going to say, ‘have these recordings evaluated for veracity,’ but yes, I’m going to need to…process what you’ve told me.”
“Of course.” Jeff rose and straightened his jacket.
“I may have more questions,” Tal said.
“Of course, sir.”
Emma rose, too. “Are you going to lock us up?”
“If my experts tell me you’re telling the truth? No. If they tell me you aren’t, you’ll wake up in the brig. How’s that?”
“That’s only fair,” Jeff said.
“Are you going to wake up in the brig?” Tal asked.
“We’ve told you everything, sir,” Jeff said. “We might not have gotten it all right…I mean, we’re just guessing about the science…but you know everything we know.”
“That’s what I want to hear. Dismissed, Captain.” He nodded at Emma. “Doctor.”
Without another word, Jeff and Emma exited the office. The door slid shut behind them. Jeff watched Emma slump.
“Whew,” she said. “Do you think he really believes it?”
“Who knows? I’m not sure I believe it,” Jeff admitted.
“He seems suspicious.”
“Of course he’s suspicious. Seems like the old Tal, though. I might not know him, but I trust him.”
Emma slumped against the wall. “I need…to lie down a bit. Care to come?”
Jeff didn’t need a nap, he needed a drink. But he didn’t want to say so.
“I can see that you don’t. Never mind. See you for dinner?”
“I have an appointment with a depressive funk. I’ll see if I can reschedule.”
“You’d better.”
He watched her walk off, appreciating her figure. His cabin was in the same direction as hers, but he wanted space, so he decided on a more circuitous route. He wandered off toward the docks. There was something about the massive windows into space that soothed him. Whisky might be poison, but the stars were medicine.
About halfway there he started feeling sleepy himself. He heard his mother’s voice in his head, telling him that a rest would be healthier than a drink. He started to regret not taking Emma up on her offer. He’d been feeling distant from her. He had some responsibility to be intimate with her, didn’t he? Hadn’t he made some kind of implied contract when they’d begun to be intimate to continue it, to go deeper? He suspected so, but the question wasn’t really in his field. Besides, the large bay windows loomed in front of him, and words failed in the face of awe.
He put his face against the window, felt the biting cold of space against his hot cheek. It felt like bliss. He rolled his forehead along the glass, savoring the coolness. He opened his eyes and saw stars so vivid and bright that he was tempted to reach out and touch them. He reminded himself that he alone, among all the humans in this universe or any other, could actually do it. It also occurred to him that he would roast and die just like any other human. A despairing, cowardly part of him was tempted.
A commotion erupted just out of sight. Reflexively, he turned his head to see the source of the noise. A passenger transport was docking and a couple thousand people were disembarking. Their laughter and conversation reverberated through the docking port, making the room suddenly many times louder than it had been mere seconds ago.
Jeff never considered himself much of a people watcher—he suspected you had to like people more than he did to make a go of it—but he had nothing better to do and no place he needed to be. He saw a gaggle of marines, clamorous and ebullient, followed by two families, clearly on vacation. They were probably on a layover and would leave for one of the resort colonies later today or tomorrow. He saw scientists and lawyers and government suits. He saw the whole spectrum of human life, spilling over from the Earth into the petri dish that was Sol Station.
One man emerged from the docking tube that surprised him. He was short and dark, with small black eyes and severe cheekbones. He wore a brightly colored poncho and a comically tiny bowler hat at an angle. His jet-black hair was shoulder length. Jeff straightened as the man walked directly toward him. Jeff looked around to see if there was anyone else nearby that might be the man’s intended destination, but there wasn’t. Nor were there any facilities—just him and the long expanse of window. He relaxed. Of course, the window. The man had come to look out into space, just as he had.
Jeff turned and looked out again. A few moments later he felt a presence beside him, heard the man’s breathing in spite of the noise that filled the dock.
“There are two kinds of beauty,” he said.
Jeff looked down at the little man. What was he, a tribal chief? A shaman? As soon as he had the thought, he felt it was right. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he did. The little man was a shaman. And where was he from? Peru? Bolivia? Were those places e
ven habitable now? He didn’t know. He didn’t bother to check it on his neural, however. Some sort of answer seemed in order.
“Uh…okay. What would those be?”
“Eternal and ephemeral.”
“What’s eternal beauty?” Jeff asked.
“Those are beauties that do not change—moral beauty, mathematical beauty, the beauty of complexity in nature.”
“And what are…what was the other kind?”
“Ephemeral. Ephemeral beauty is the kind we love best. It is the beauty of everything that can be lost. And the most beautiful things of all are those that are already gone.” The shaman turned and looked him up and down. “You strike me as a man who knows something about this.”
Jeff glanced down and caught the man’s eyes. A chill ran through him. It felt like this man was looking through him, into him, maybe even past him toward some greater truth that Jeff was not aware of. Jeff said nothing. He turned back to the stars.
“Ah, I see,” the small man said. “You have lost faith in yourself.”
“What?” Jeff snapped.
“A wise man once said, ‘The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.’”
“Who said that?” Jeff asked.
“FDR,” the shaman said.
“Who?” Jeff asked.
“Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” The little man’s brows furrowed. “You are from a place where there was no FDR. You have come a long way indeed.”
Jeff was tempted to look up this Roosevelt character but his thoughts were buzzing too fast. Before he could sort through them, the man spoke again. “They’re not gone.”
“Who’s not gone?” Jeff asked. Part of him was anxious for the impossible news that the beings of String 310 might still be alive…somewhere.
