Black Box

by Ivan Turner

  When it was over, MacDonald lay backwards over a chair, blood smeared over his face and hands, his eyes fluttering, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Not much better but still on his feet, Beckett went to the cockpit and pushed on the door.

  “Colonel!” he cried through the metal. “Colonel Walker!” His words were slurred, barely even recognizable. He could make it. He could do this. He was so close to actually winning one. “Please,” he sobbed, going to his knees. “…please…”

  The door opened, sliding into its frame, and Beckett tumbled inside the small room. Standing there, the strut from a chair in his raised hand, Colonel Nicholas Walker looked down on Captain Ted Beckett and didn’t know what to make of him. Just outside, he could see MacDonald...and Roger. Roger was dead.

  “The box…” Beckett was moaning. “…don’t launch the box…”

  Lowering the strut, suddenly feeling the fool, Walker knelt next to this battered man and looked into his eyes. There, he saw the truth. Beckett looked up at him, spread one bloody handprint on the knee of the colonel’s white pants.

  “I’m sorry,” Walker said, his voice laced with sadness. “I’ve already done so.”

  Better Late Than Never

  Massey was driving. Boone could handle himself on a bike, but Massey was masterful. He’d grabbed her from her post in Control and, with little briefing, had dragged her to the hangar deck where there was still one bike waiting for them.

  Boone was using the transit time to check his weapons and gird his psyche for the fight to come. It had been so long since he’d seen any real combat that he wasn’t sure he could actually handle it. In his mind he concentrated only on his determination, effectively blocking out what had passed for his rationale for so long. He could have had a transfer. He could have had a promotion.

  Now he could have self respect.

  As they burst into the clearing, he tried to take in the whole scene at once. The sight of the Einstein was distracting enough, a piece of history right in front of his eyes. In the back of his mind, there was this nagging doubt. What if he was too late? What if it was all over? Rodrigo would gun him down and celebrate his death. Had he made the right decision? Should he turn around? No! Boone blocked it all out. He focused on the scene. He looked for the clues and answered his own questions. Instead of a historical anomaly he saw a ship with a blown hatch. He saw Cabrera binding and splinting Tedesco’s arm while Yamata stood by. He saw Knudson, Goldfarb, and Irvin entering the hatch.

  He didn’t see Beckett anywhere.

  Boone jumped off of the bike even before it had come to a full stop. He leveled his rifle at the three soldiers. “You men stand down!” he shouted.

  They hesitated, looked back at Boone.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Knudson muttered.

  “Drop your weapons. You’re all under arrest.”

  By now, Massey had levered herself off of the bike and was covering Boone, keeping an eye on Yamata and Tedesco.

  Knudson snorted, but Irvin put out a steadying hand. “Mr. Boone, you are way out of your league here. I thought you and the sergeant…”

  “Shut up, Irvin!”

  “Fuck this,” said Knudson and raised his rifle, but Massey took the shot at him. Her shot was wide, hitting the side of the ship, but it sent the message. Even Knudson had the sense to wait.

  “Either drop them or there’s going to be a massacre,” Boone said.

  “No there won’t.” Beckett appeared in the hatch, helped along by Colonel Walker.

  Cabrera looked up from where she was tending to Tedesco and gasped. “Ted! My God.” She ran right to him, but he gathered his strength and shrugged her off.

  The three soldiers turned away from Boone, confused. They knew MacDonald had gone into the ship and they knew that Rodrigo had gone to deal with Beckett. What they saw was very telling. No Rodrigo. No MacDonald. Just Beckett.

  “You lay down your guns now,” he said to them. “This is over.”

  Knudson meant to say something but Irvin stayed him again. They dropped their weapons. It was amazing that the authority of even a wounded Beckett could accomplish what an armed and healthy Boone and Massey could not.

  “Massey, go back to the ship right away,” Beckett ordered, without missing a beat. The fact that Boone and Massey had shown up didn’t seem to have fazed him in the least. “Colonel Walker has launched the black box and I want Rollins to track it as best he can. We’re going after it.”

  Boone felt his spirits fall. He’d thought sure that his involvement was going to mean something. He’d had such conviction. But now it seemed all worthless. Beckett was alive. The black box had been launched. He was useless as always.

  “Tracking it won’t be necessary, sir,” Boone said, dejected. “I know exactly where it’s going.”

  Beckett separated himself from Walker and walked over to Boone on shaky legs. “Do you want to explain yourself, Mr. Boone?”

  “It’s going into the Ghost wormhole, sir, what’s left of it. A black box can fit, even if a ship can’t.”

  “How do you know that?” Tedesco blurted out.

  Beckett turned on her, then turned back to Boone.

  “It was Rollins, sir. It’s a long story but he claims the Ghosts are time travelers. He says he’s one of them. Chief Hardy and Mr. Tunsley will back me up.”

  The implications of what Boone was telling Beckett were astonishing. Not a word of it was lost. In the back of his mind, Beckett had been wondering how the Einstein had managed to make a landing without it being reported. He wanted more answers, but there was no time to get them from Boone.

  Indicating the three soldiers standing under the watchful eye of Massey, Beckett ordered her to shoot them if they moved.

  Appearing to have regained some of his strength, he walked over to where Tedesco was standing, looking like a wounded puppy. He felt no sympathy as he lifted his fist and punched her square in the face. She went down like a house of cards.

  “Ted!” Cabrera admonished, rushing forward, but smart enough not to get down and help the lieutenant.

  Beckett ignored her. “Get up,” he hissed at Tedesco.

  To her credit, lip broken and bloody, Tedesco found her feet.

  And Beckett hit her again.

  This time he broke her nose and she went down so fast that some of the spurting blood hung in the air as she fell.

  He did not tell her to get up again and she did not try. But she did look up at him, all pretense of innocence gone. She stared daggers at him and he caught them with his teeth.

  “My father will have you gutted,” she spat, not knowing whether she hated him or herself more. It was a testament to her lack of resolve. For as long as daddy was alive, she would always fall back on him in a desperate situation.

  Incensed, rage taking over, he moved and grabbed Knudson’s gun off of the ground. He had it turned and leveled at her head in under two seconds.

  “No, Ted. No,” cried Cabrera, this time launching herself forward and knocking his gun hand aside. He shouted in pain as the bullet wound in his shoulder stretched against the muscle. The cry was so violent and laced with such anger that Cabrera shrank away from him. “You can’t,” she mewed.

  He turned on her, grabbing her and thrusting her up against the rumbler. He pressed himself close to her. “Why can’t I?”

  She tried to squirm free, cowed by his fury. Still, she managed to squeak, “It’s murder.”

  Beckett let her go and stood there, breathing down onto the doctor’s face. “Murder?” he challenged. “She’s a mutineer. Last I checked, the penalty for mutiny is still execution.”

  When space exploration had first begun, it could be many months before a ship saw port. If any portion of the crew mutinied, the captain had the right to assign and carry out punishment. It was a law that, no matter how outdated it had become, had never gone off the books.

  The last of the color drained from Tedesco’s face.

  Beckett turned and
looked at the rest of them. Goldfarb. Yamata. Irvin. Knudson. He’d saved Knudson’s life a half dozen times. And then, of course, there was Rodrigo…

  “Mr. Boone, go inside and collect Mr. Bonamo and Mr. MacDonald. MacDonald is a mutineer like this scum so don’t trust him and don’t get too near him. He is absolutely the most dangerous person on this planet right now, no matter how injured he appears to be. If he so much as gives you a dirty look, you have my permission to shoot him.”

  Boone moved inside the airlock, gun raised, and disappeared from view.

  Beckett leveled his gun at the rogue soldiers and beckoned them away from the ship and away from the rumbler. They did as they were told. He ordered them face first on the ground, hands above their heads. They complied, the wind completely taken from their sails. He told them in no uncertain terms that if any one of them moved, he would execute all four of them.

  “Samantha, you step away from the lieutenant.”

  Cabrera had found the courage to go to Tedesco. She hesitated. “What are you going to do, Ted?”

  “Just step away.”

  Hesitantly, she did so, leaving Tedesco by herself, still on her knees in the dirt. Beckett ordered her away from the rumbler. He went right up to her, lowering his gun. “Stand up.”

  Slowly, painfully, she complied.

  “Who else?”

  She laughed at him. After everything, even with his gun ready to come up and end her life, she had the temerity to laugh at him. He couldn’t stop himself from hitting her again.

  “Ted!” Cabrera cried.

  “Shut up,” he warned her before turning back to Tedesco. The lieutenant was back on one knee, a thick line of blood dribbling out of her mouth. “Soames?” he asked her.

  She nodded.

  “Ukpere? Applegate?”

  Looking up at him with cold eyes, she nodded again.

  “Tunsley?”

  She laughed again, but this time it was more cynical and less mocking. “Who’d want him?”

  He ignored the comment. “Dorian?”

  “No,” she said. “She’s been with you for too long.”

  “And Rodrigo hasn’t?”

  Tedesco dropped from her knee into a sitting position. She wasn’t about to get up again. She was just strong enough to finish the conversation, but she didn’t think she could stand being hit again.

  “Who else?” Beckett asked, crouching down so he could face her.

  She looked at him with her darkening eyes and bloody lips. “What’s the difference? We’re not mutineers.”

  “Assassins then,” he hissed. “Pick your god damned poison.”

  “Our orders come from the Admiralty,” she argued.

  “I don’t fucking care if they come from God Himself. I want to know who was involved.”

  “It was half the crew, you stupid asshole.”

  Beckett shoved her to the left and reached onto her belt for her reader. Tedesco didn’t even protest as he brought it to life and began scanning through the documents. Most of the sensitive ones were sealed with a password, but Tedesco gave it up quickly enough. There was nothing left to hide. Suddenly Beckett had the names of everyone who knew about the conspiracy. It really was half the crew. If he threw them all off of the ship, everyone else would be strung out covering the shifts just so they could get home.

  Lowering his arm, he looked up to the sky and just breathed. “I don’t understand,” he asked no one in particular. “Why would you do this?”

  “It’s about the history, Captain,” Tedesco answered.

  As if just remembering that she was there, his head snapped down so that he could look at her again. “What does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means everything, you ignorant prick. You’re so stupid. You think history is all in the past but it’s not. So much of it hasn’t even been made because we don’t have time travel yet.”

  “What? What?! What are you talking about?” He came so close to hitting her again that, later, he would actually be unsure of whether or not he’d done it.

  Colonel Walker had edged over and was listening as well. His face was unreadable. He was suffering from severe emotional shock. Every member of his crew had been slaughtered and he was only now beginning to understand that nothing he could have done would have prevented it.

  Except preventing the launching of the black box.

  Tedesco continued. “If we want history, our history, to follow a certain course of events, to lead us exactly where we are, we need to pick up the clues and make it happen.”

  Beckett looked at Walker and back at Tedesco. He glanced at the reader in his hand and thought of the log he’d been listening to since this mission started. Walker’s log. He had long since deduced that the Admiralty had set up the whole situation, manipulating the crew into massacring the people of the Einstein but he still didn’t know what course of events they were trying to manipulate. And it was clear on his face.

  “Tyler Coddit went out to look for the Einstein,” Tedesco explained. “He never found it and went home to lead the fight for our liberation from the eXchengue.” She turned her attention to Walker. “I’m sorry Colonel, but you could never go home. If you go home, Colonel Coddit never goes out and we might end up subjugated by the eXchengue forever.”

  Walker, who had never heard of the eXchengue and didn’t know the history of a world that had experienced two hundred years in his brief absence, knew that she was right. He understood what she was saying. He was sharp enough to realize that it was the black box that had given his crew’s murderers their information. He was savvy enough to realize that he had been allowed to live while his crew was murdered so that he could be duped into launching the black box.

  He was trained well enough to accept responsibility for those actions and take the blames for all of those deaths.

  “I get it,” he said, stepping slowly and dejectedly past the captain. He looked into the lieutenant’s bloodied face and asked, “You couldn’t let us go home. But why did we have to die?”

  As the question penetrated her large, wounded eyes, Lara Tedesco realized that she had no answer for it.

  Aftermath

  Beckett forced the mutinous soldiers to dig graves for the crew of the Einstein, and for his traitorous soldiers. And for Burbank. He gave Cabrera a bike and ordered her to report back to the Valor immediately. She was to go straight to Hardy and tell him everything that had happened. No one else was to know. Once she was gone and the dead were buried, he held a small service and presided over it himself. All throughout, Colonel Walker remained silent, always aware of the eyes that continuously strayed in his direction.

  Beckett knew that he didn’t have the manpower or the resources to hold the mutineers. MacDonald, Yamata, Knudson, Goldfarb, Irvin. They were some of the toughest soldiers in the Space Force. Rodrigo, even with her ruined shoulder, was more than a force to be reckoned with. She joined them as they were digging the graves, her arm hanging uselessly at her side. Not a word passed between her and her captain as she picked up a shovel with her good hand and began stabbing ineffectually at the dirt. Beckett watched and felt such an emptiness inside of him that even his rage couldn’t fill it. Ultimately, he put all of their weapons onto the rumbler and ordered Boone into the pilot box. Walker was loaded into the passenger compartment. Massey and Bonamo, recovered from the shock to his spine, boarded the airbikes.

  The faces that stared at him as he stepped over to the rumbler were no longer the faces of his friends, his crewmates. They were no better than pirates.

  “What do you think will happen to you when you get back to Earth?” Tedesco asked finally. “Do you think they’ll give you a medal?”

  Beckett shook his head. All of the anger had drained out of him. Without the rage clouding his brain, he suddenly understood. Hardy had been right and wrong at the same time. There had been an Einstein. The black box had shown the Admiralty how and when to fabricate history, but it had also provided them with
an opportunity to shed themselves of Ted Beckett, a feat they had been trying to accomplish for ten years.

  There was a power to being the captain of a ship. He had always known that. Hell, he thrived on it. In certain circles, he was a celebrity. The Admiralty was powerful, but not all powerful. You can’t just fire a captain of the space force. You can’t even kill him. If a captain dies under mysterious circumstances, even on a mission, there’s an inquiry. But not this time. Not on this mission. Though none of this was his doing, the disgrace heaped upon him would be insurmountable. Dead or alive, the Admiralty would be well and truly rid of Ted Beckett.

  Opening the hatch to the rumbler’s pilot box, he put one foot inside before stopping. “I’ll execute anyone that comes back to the ship.” Then he put the other foot inside and closed the door. Calm, sure of his position if not his future, he set off back to the Valor, leaving the rest of them marooned.

  Boone debriefed him as they traveled. Beckett listened to the pieces of Rollins’ story that his infantry officer conveyed and tried to fit them all together to form a picture. Rollins’ claim of being a Ghost sounded like a desperate ploy to escape the failing mutineers. The only flaw in that theory was that he wasn’t on Tedesco’s list.

  The more pressing matter was what the captain should do with all of the people who were. In addition to those who had been left behind at the Einstein, there were twelve names on that list, including Tunsley’s entire engine room staff. That would make for a rough trip home. There were others on board who could sub in, but Tunsley would have little patience for them. Beckett considered keeping the suspect crew on board. It didn’t seem likely that anyone would attempt anything while enroute back to Earth. Still, Beckett didn’t expect he would be able to sleep knowing that he was surrounded by enemies. In the end, he handed the list of names to Boone and instructed him to escort every single one of them off of the ship. They’d just have to make do with the short staff.