by Ramy Vance
I don’t know why she didn’t tell me she was gonna do it. I don’t know why she didn’t trust me.
“I don’t know.” Kelba’s lip curled. “How convenient. Smart girl like you don’t remember nothing, do you? I suspect booze and pain have dulled your memory, Ensign.” As if forced to pick up dog shit, Kelba plucked up another towel and wiped her hands. She dropped this second bloody towel on the floor beside the first. Then she swaggered to the door. “I suggest you do a bit of soul-searching. I expect you to be back on duty and sober at oh-six-hundred, Ensign Potlova.”
The woman waved in front of the access panel and strode down the hall. The sharp click of her heels faded to silence.
Fingers trembling, Petra tenderly felt her swollen cheek. In the corner of the room, Lieutenant Bryce shifted his weight. Once the door slid shut, and they were alone, he picked up the towel and stepped forward, offering it to her.
Petra flinched backward. Bryce froze with a grimace. “I apologize for the treatment,” he said quietly. “You must understand the urgency of our mission. Lives are on the line. All of ours, and yours as well.”
Petra stared at him for a long time, saying nothing. Her left eye was swelling shut. Bryce slid the half-empty glass of water in her direction. Petra stared at it. Then, slowly, deliberately, she turned her head and spat a spray of blood onto the floor at his feet.
Bryce shut his eyes with a grimace. “I deserved that.”
“You deserved it across your nice clean uniform,” Petra slurred. “I didn’t wanna get another tooth knocked out.”
Since Petra had refused the towel, Bryce bent and used it to wipe a spray of bloody saliva from his shoes. He rose slowly, wringing his hands through the pink-stained towel. “Miss Potlova,” he said slowly. “Let me offer you a piece of advice.”
Petra could think of several pieces of advice she could offer him, but she was too tired, and her head hurt too much to get into another shouting match. She stared at him warily.
“The MP are relentless,” Bryce said. “We have to be. The survival of the fleet depends on it. Understand, Miss Potlova. I don’t believe you are a traitor. I believe you’re a hard-working woman and an upstanding citizen who got scammed by a very devious mind.” He set the towel down, placed both palms on the table, and leaned close to her. “That’s why it’s so important that you cooperate with our investigation.”
Should have said that to your boss before she knocked out my teeth, Petra wanted to say, but those weren’t the words of Ensign Potlova—they were the fighting words of Petie the street urchin, and Petra wasn’t on the streets anymore, scrapping over half-eaten ration packs.
She sucked in a deep, wavering breath. Her head hurt so bad. “I don’t know nothin’,” she mumbled.
“I believe that you don’t think you know anything important,” Bryce agreed. “But we do know that Jaeger used you to facilitate her mutiny. I need you to remember how that happened. Do you understand?”
Petra looked away.
“We’re going to let you go for now,” Bryce said. “You’re tired, and you have to be on duty soon. However, we’re going to talk again.”
Petra mumbled something noncommittal as Bryce strode for the door. “One more thing.” He paused with his hand over the access panel. Petra stirred, lifting her chin to him.
“Go down to the med bay and ask for the blue stuff,” he suggested. “They’ll know what you’re talking about. There’s nothing better for a hangover.” He paused, then added, “That is, if there’s any left.”
The panel activated, and Lieutenant Bryce walked away, leaving the door open behind him.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A massive holo-board neatly bisected the shared command crew quarters.
“Where did you get that?” Seeker stepped out of the foyer in his prison cell, idly rubbing his shock-cuffs.
Jaeger had to stand on tiptoes to reach the top of the board. Consulting her notes, she scribbled something about population statistics. Then she glanced over her shoulder guiltily. “I had it fabricated. I think better when I can write things out by hand.”
Toner, in an attempt to take up as much of the limited space as humanly possible, sprawled across the sofa with his long legs dangling off the armrest. He tapped through his computer with a grunt. “All three of us are here, Captain. You’re gonna have to explain all that P-value stuff if you want us grunts to follow it.”
Jaeger stepped back to study the masterwork of intersecting notes and equations covering the board. Then she shook her head. “This is mostly for my benefit.” She turned, tossing Seeker a spare computer. “I loaded all the population notes and data onto an old drive. It’s not connected to any network. Basically, only a book. It’s for you to study.”
Seeker examined the ancient model in his palms and activated it. Slowly, he lowered himself into one of the beat-up armchairs. It sagged under his weight. “Nobody else coming to this little meeting?”
This little meeting, from what he understood, was to decide the direction of the very future of humanity.
Toner grunted again.
“No,” Jaeger said. “Occy…he only wants to play with his machines. This doesn’t mean much to him. I think it’s too big for him to think about.”
Seeker looked up, rubbing his jaw. He was overdue for a shave. “Not the twerp. I was talking more about the two dozen or so grown-ups you’ve recently added to your crew.”
“Seeker.” Toner rolled his eye. “What could our newly-minted doctor and scientist possibly have to say about how to populate a colony and ensure genetic stability?”
Jaeger winced. “The new crew are…they’re still riding on all the Tribes programming the activation downloaded into their brains. I’m going to have a broader meeting to take in their thoughts, but…”
“You don’t trust your crew,” Toner said, singsong, as he flipped a card graphic on his computer screen.
“Are you playing solitaire?” Seeker asked.
“It’s Free Cell.”
“I trust my crew,” Jaeger said through gritted teeth. “As much as appropriate. But they’re young, and if I ask them to help with the fundamentals of building a colony, I know they’ll come up with something that looks exactly like the Tribes program. Because it’s all they know.”
“You don’t want to escape the fleet to get to work building Tribe Thirteen,” Toner said.
“Exactly.”
Seeker leaned back in the chair. It creaked and groaned around him. “You don’t want to replicate the Tribes programs. So you…drag me along to this meeting?”
“You’ve never lied to me.” Jaeger turned a hard stare on Seeker. “You’ve never tried to deceive me that you’ve come around to my way of thinking. You don’t agree with what I’m doing here. I wish you did, but you don’t.
“If you’re going to fight me on it, it’s helpful if you do it out in the open. The crew is going to parrot Tribe talking points back to me because of their indoctrination. You’ve had a few months to collect yourself and put some thought into what you do and why.”
Seeker met her hard stare and saw nothing in it but sincerity so raw that it practically vibrated the air around her. I haven’t lied to you, but I’ve been keeping a few secrets of my own.
Did she know? He studied her. Did she know about the weird psycho-technical dance he was doing with her seditious AI? He couldn’t tell. The woman had a poker face he wouldn’t want to meet across a card table.
“This is happening,” Jaeger said. “We’ve been given the land. We have permission to build our new home. We have a chance here to save the human race. We are all going to be responsible for whether it succeeds or fails.”
No, Seeker decided finally, settling back into the chair. He crossed a leg and examined the root directory on his old computer. She didn’t know.
“It’s going to fail,” he said. “Maybe not for a while because you’re smart. But eventually. If you want to weed all the survival instinct out of your
settlers, don't be surprised if they don’t…survive.” He studied the log for a moment before adding, “I’m surprised you don’t already have the settlement planned down to the last detail.”
Jaeger relaxed visibly, her shoulders slumping as Seeker accepted his role as doomsayer.
“I had general plans, but they assumed I’d have a much larger initial population,” she said. “A thousand, at least. Now that we’re limited to three hundred, we have to…cull the lists.”
“Hey, Captain?” Toner looked up from his game, suddenly bright with curiosity. “The thought just occurred to me. We’re gonna be flushing most of these embryos, aren’t we?”
Jaeger closed her eyes. Pain flitted across her face, to be replaced by a mask of calm. “As per our treaty. Yes.”
“It’s gonna be a huge dump of biological material.”
“Yes, Toner. It will be.”
“It’d be a shame to let all of it go to waste.”
Jaeger stared at him. Slowly, Seeker also turned to stare at the vampire.
“What the fuck are you getting at?” Seeker growled. Jaeger shot him a surprised but grateful look.
Toner shrugged, leg restlessly bouncing as he considered the holo-board. “Hey, man. Beggars can’t be choosers. Our protein and fat caches aren’t going to last forever and this man, for one, cannot survive on Locauri fruit and nuts.” His eyes narrowed. “So distribution should undo excess…”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Jaeger breathed, finally catching Toner’s implication.
“I’m just saying. You weren’t exactly complaining when Baby ate a member of your crew.”
Jaeger covered her face with her hands.
Seeker leaned forward, lifting one warning finger to Toner. “I don’t know what the fuck you get into everywhere else, but when you’re around me, you are going to at least pretend to be a civilized human being, do you understand?”
Toner stared at the beefy finger for a moment before cracking a wide smile full of too many sharp teeth. He snapped his jaw, making Seeker flinch backward.
“That Tribes strong-man, survive-at-any-cost philosophy looking real appealing now, Seeker?” Toner grinned wolfishly. “Your precious Tribes program that made this?” He gestured to himself. “The baby-eaters? ‘Cause I’m sure there’s a whole phalanx of us waiting in the wings.”
“That’s enough, Toner,” Jaeger said sharply, but Toner was on a roll. He leaned closer, and Seeker had to force himself not to lean away. “If you’re not careful,” Toner whispered, “this is exactly what we’re going to get out of our new world.”
Tension rang in the air like the high note on a piano—sharp and painful and just beyond hearing. Then it snapped like a rubber band as Toner hopped to his feet, flicking his fingers in a gesture of disgust. “Well, I’ve had enough of this already. I’m going for a jog.”
“Since when do you jog?” Jaeger asked weakly.
Toner scowled at her. Then he shuffled his feet—doing a slow jog backward out of the crew quarters, never taking his gaze off them. As he reached the access tunnel, he reached up with two pale, skinny arms and offered them a two-fingered salute before disappearing.
Jaeger stared after him for a long time. Then she sighed and slumped onto the freshly-vacated sofa, massaging her temples.
Seeker stared into the emptiness of the access tunnel, considering Toner’s parting words in silence.
Finally, he heard a small, wavering intake of breath and turned to see Jaeger staring up at him through the cage of her fingers. “What would you do?” she asked hoarsely.
Seeker glanced back to the access tunnel. “I’d start by popping open a can of whoop-ass.”
She studied him, golden-eyed and somber. “Fighting and fighting and more fighting.”
“Some things warrant an old-fashioned ass-kicking. Cannibalism is one of them.”
“He’s not wrong.”
Seeker turned sharply, facing her.
She met his gaze, steady and unblinking. “He wasn’t blowing smoke,” she added. “The Tribes made him that way.” Her lip twitched in a curl of disgust. “Hungry. All the time. When resources are limited, and they have vampire mutants to feed, do you think they’d let all that fresh biomatter go to waste?”
Seeker stared at her and let the silence be his answer.
Somehow, he knew she was right. He remembered little of the specific principles of the Tribes programs, but down to his core, he knew that “waste not” was one of them.
“What would you do?” she asked again.
Are you playing me, Sarah Jaeger? He wondered. Convincing me step-by-step that the Tribes are wrong? That I’m not one of them? Nobody lies, but nobody tells the truth—are those the new rules of the game?
He drew in a deep, slow breath. Then he picked up his computer. “Well,” he finally broke the silence. “I think what you do is you invest heavily in agriculture and farmers when you’re first building a settlement. Get your supply lines heavily entrenched. Famine will turn people into monsters as quick as any genetic mutations.”
The early morning hours found Jaeger treating herself to her first long sonic shower in days. Her conversation with Seeker had run into the small hours of the morning. For all his He-Man effect, his fondness for cigarettes and booze, and pumping iron to rock music and Tribal dogmatism, the man had a powerful brain for logistics.
Once he was properly motivated, of course.
Her comm beeped, alerting her to a new text message from Toner, complete with signature disregard for the conventions of the written word.
LMTONER: how did it go
Jaeger brushed some soap from her face and let it melt away in the steam. She reached through the vibrating water droplets and tapped out a message on her computer screen.
SWJAEGER: Great, once you left.
To which Toner promptly responded with a thumbs-up icon.
SWJAEGER: You weren’t supposed to blow off the whole meeting once you’d made your point, though.
LMTONER: gotta commit to the bit. seeker’s not dumb. if i didn’t get dramatic he would know we were playing him
Jaeger hesitated. She wondered. His logic made sense, but she wondered if there wasn’t a little more to it than pure pragmatism. Toner pulled out the Lear quotes when they articulated his point better than he could. And he had met her eye when he had thrown her words back in her face.
She shook her head. She couldn’t let herself get roped into more drama. She needed to change the subject.
SWJAEGER: We’re going with four lawyers.
There was a long pause before Toner’s next message came through. She watched, satisfied, as he began to type several times and started over.
LMTONER: what the fuck
SWJAEGER: That’s what you get for blowing off team meetings.
LMTONER: what the fuck
SWJAEGER: He agreed with me. We need at least a few people who understand how to craft and enforce just laws more than we need more beefy stonemasons. We’re adding legal experts to the roster. You got outvoted.
LMTONER: i thought we wanted fewer bloodsuckers
Jaeger’s chuckle vibrated strangely around the little shower chamber. She reached over and turned off the water jets.
SWJAEGER: we can use a retainment chip, too. Like what you have. Zap’em if they get out of hand.
LMTONER: I hate that idea.
Jaeger pinched the bridge of her nose. He was right. It was a shitty idea, and this was one time she really wanted to listen to Toner.
SWJAEGER: What else are you doing?
She stepped out of the coffin-sized shower and wiped herself down with a fabulously large and soft bath towel. You learn to appreciate the little things. The Osprey had a fantastic automated laundry service.
Toner’s response came as she was moisturizing, and it made her lift an eyebrow.
LMTONER: yeah im team building
SWJAEGER: Team building? We just *did* the team building. You weren’t there.
> LMTONER: not for the settlement
SWJAEGER: What for, then?
LMTONER: for the freeze tag league duh
LMTONER: you in? starting a scrimmage game in like, ten. fighter bay.
Jaeger stared at the screen for a long time. Like the fresh towel, it was a little thing, the idea of Toner hunched over a roster of players, all her fresh new crew looking for something fun to do in their downtime, but it made her stupidly happy.
SWJAEGER: I’d love to. But I have another meeting, and I need to sleep.
LMTONER: your loss. nighty night.
Jaeger stepped into her bunk to find the Overseer-gifted hologram generator on her shelf aglow with activity. Kwin appeared to be in conversation with someone off-screen, his antennae and mandibles moving busily. When Jaeger’s hatch shut behind her, he turned, head cocked to one side.
“Are you DIstressed?”
She gave him a tired smile and tossed her towel into the laundry pile. She’d decided that on top of a proper shower, she was going to treat herself to sleeping in real, honest-to-God pajamas tonight. The sweatpants and old t-shirt were about the softest things she’d ever felt. “Honestly, I feel better than I have in weeks. Why do you think I’m distressed?”
Kwin waved an antenna, but since the holo-recorder on his side of their conversation didn’t fully capture the long limbs, she couldn’t tell what he was gesturing at. Then, awkwardly, he twitched one of his foreclaws in her direction.
