Starfighter Down

by M. G. Herron

  Casey called up the holocontrol menus and logged herself in. Normally, a captain wouldn’t have access to the video footage of the hangar. That was reserved for the commanding officers and security personnel—with built-in overrides for Inquisitors. Sure enough, once Casey logged in with her password and biometrics, she found she had access to all sorts of information she hadn’t been able to acquire before. Personnel records. Security footage. Access logs. The names of the two officers currently in the brig for disorderly conduct.

  She opened up a feed of the sick bay and cycled through a number of different cameras until she located the rest of her squad. Park lay in bed covered in sweat, his skin glistening and his eyes closed. He had one arm in a cast already and had been stripped out of his flight suit, down to a black t-shirt and boxer shorts. His identi-ring hung on a chain around his neck. Yorra had a gash to her head that was currently being treated by a nurse, who sprayed an aerosol over the wound, sealing it and coating it with a healing gel.

  Casey was glad to see that they were both in recovery. She’d have to talk to them once they had been treated and make sure their stories matched, or see what they remembered differently. Not because they were trying to put one over on anybody. Simply because, as Casey well knew, your vision narrowed to a tunnel in the heat of action. It was likely that they had seen something she hadn’t.

  Casey pushed that feed back and opened another in the foreground. In this window, she loaded the current feed from the hangar. A timestamp showed in the bottom right corner. Repairs were well underway. A dozen mechanics were hard at work rebuilding the hangar floor so that no one would accidentally fall through the hole and tumble into space.

  She cycled back through the footage until a bright orange blast turned the whole screen into a lens flare. She cycled back farther until she spotted her own starfighter entering the hangar. She watched herself find her dock and set the Sabre down. After coming across the row from another starfighter, Mick began to hook up hoses and cables to her Sabre and set chocks under the wheels before hurrying to the next ship that came in behind her.

  Casey blinked and knitted her eyebrows together. After Admiral Miyaru showed her what happened with Nevers and the drone, Casey was suspicious of everything, especially her own perceptions. She rewound the footage to watch that again, this time keeping a closer eye on Mick.

  This time she spotted clearly what she had seen in passing just a moment ago. Mick ran towards Casey’s Sabre, picked up the power cable and plugged it in; picked up the diagnostic cable, opened a panel under the left wing of her starfighter and plugged that in as well. And as he connected the second cable, Mick shook his head and lifted one hand to his ear as if he felt a pain there. He stuck one finger in his ear and twisted it around; dropped his hand, shook his head one more time and then set the wheel chocks before running to the next Sabre.

  He had been affected by something; that much was clear in the footage.

  Casey thought back to how she’d seen Mick behave before he freaked out. He had done a similar sort of thing, shaking his head and acting like something was bothering him. Casey got migraines herself, sometimes, so she understood the reaction. And perhaps that’s why she hadn’t given it a second thought when she saw him do it in person.

  But the logical part of her brain, the part that liked technical instructions when she was able to sit still long enough to read them, knew that whatever had caused Mick’s madness must have a source, a cause.

  Mick didn't just have a psychotic break for no reason. Not when he had been acting normal up to that point.

  But Casey couldn't very well go back to Admiral Miyaru and say, “Hey, Admiral, I think I found it. Mick had a migraine and then he tried to kill all of his friends.” If his strange behavior on camera here had anything to do with what had happened, Casey needed proof.

  She fast-forwarded through the rest of the footage. She watched herself march across the hangar, angrily confront Walcott when he caught up to her, then walk all the way back to retrieve the cube from her starfighter, only to get waylaid by Mick. She saw the others come running to help her. She saw them corner Mick, and try to talk him down. She saw Mick light the torch and set it to the canister.

  The gas canister ruptured, set off several others, and exploded, sucking equipment and people across the room as atmosphere evacuated into space.

  But nothing there gave her any more clues as to what had caused Mick’s unusual behavior.

  By this point, Casey was getting restless. She was still kind of shaken from her confrontation with Admiral Miyaru, so she determined that while she let her mind work on that puzzle, she would go down to the hospital wing and visit Park and Yorra to make sure they were doing okay. The admiral had been right: the Furies needed her.

  Casey closed all the windows, logged out, and powered off the computer. She strode into the corridor of the destroyer. She was near the bridge right now, and people were hurrying back and forth, absorbed in their own assignments. Almost no one paid her any attention except to glance down at her dirty uniform, and then away.

  Looking down at herself, Casey realized she was covered in soot marks from the explosion, grease from hanging onto the Sabre’s strut, and that her flight suit was ripped in several places. She hadn’t had any opportunity to clean up yet. Admiral Miyaru had ushered her straight into the war room and made her wait while they retrieved her black box.

  Casey had managed to escape relatively uninjured. She only had a couple small abrasions, a cut on her forehead that had since stopped bleeding, a few bruises and a sore wrist. There wasn’t much to clean up. But as the flight lead, Casey knew how important it was to keep up appearances.

  Her father's voice drifted into her head again. “A good leader looks the part,” he had once told Casey. “Especially when she doesn't want to.”

  If it were up to her and her alone, Casey would have gone straight to the hospital wing. It was the kind of thing a good friend did, dismiss their own appearance in order to support each other. But I’m not merely their friend, Casey thought. I’m also supposed to be their leader.

  So Casey turned down the hall that would lead her to the bunk their flight shared. When the door hissed open, she was surprised to find Yorra holding a tiny glass to her lips with her head thrown back. She choked and coughed when she saw Casey, swallowed the liquor and made an unhappy sound in her throat.

  “This is the swill Park keeps in his footlocker. Smells like socks and tastes even worse.”

  Casey snorted, crossed the room and fell on the bed next to Yorra, leaning back and tossing her arms out. Flight leader she may have been, but right now it looked like Yorra needed a friend.

  “How’re you holding up, Gears?” Casey asked.

  “How’s it look like I’m holding up?”

  Casey unbuttoned the collar of her torn, stained flight suit. “Let me get a swig of that.”

  Yorra grunted and passed the bottle over. Casey took a small swallow and winced. It was grain alcohol, the kind a bored loadmaster brewed on ship with vat-grown potatoes. Park loved this stuff and saved it for special occasions.

  “But you’re right,” Casey said. “Smells like socks. Not clean ones either.”

  In spite of this observation, they each took another couple sips. It wasn’t enough to make her drunk, but it was enough to quell Casey's frayed nerves and allow her to think straight for a second. She stood up, slipped the ripped and dirty flight suit off and found a new one in her own footlocker.

  She pulled on the stretchy suit without bothering to take her boots off, and tidied up her appearance in a mirrored hololens that she summoned with the swipe of a hand.

  “How’s Park doing?” Casey asked.

  “He’s still out. Hit his head pretty hard.”

  Casey grunted.

  “I’m gonna go back to stay with him in a minute,” Yorra said. “The doc says he should wake up soon. I just needed a… minute to…gather my thoughts.”

  As Yorra smoothe
d her hair back, Casey saw that her hands were quaking with a constant tremor. Gently, Casey helped Yorra out of her dirty flight suit—also torn and battered from the explosion—and picked out a fresh change of clothes for her. When she’d changed, they went to the lav together and washed their hands and faces.

  Doing something mundane helped calm her, and by the time they were done Yorra’s hands had steadied somewhat. Though the lieutenant was obviously just as shaken up as Casey felt, she hadn’t been sure up until this point if she was going to tell her friends what she had convinced Admiral Miyaru to let her do.

  But now she felt the need to confide in someone. To keep an open, honest line of communication between the two of them, no matter what. Casey hoped that talking to Yorra about everything would get her friend’s mind off what had happened. And it worked. As Casey recounted her conversation with Admiral Miyaru—the assignment to investigate Mick’s behavior, not what the Kryl drone had done—Yorra’s eyes went from distant and unfocused to sharp and alert.

  “So she just gave you access to the security system?”

  Casey nodded. “I already reviewed the hangar incident a few times.”

  “Damn,” Yorra said. “That’s intense. Did you figure out what made him go crazy?”

  “Not yet. I’ll interrogate every single mechanic on that hangar floor if I have to.”

  Yorra gave her a judgy look.

  “What?” Casey asked.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Captain, but you tend to come off a little strong. Maybe try something a little more subtle first.”

  “Okay, maybe interrogate was the wrong word…”

  “You think?”

  After this was all over, Casey would have to return to her normal duties as flight lead and starfighter pilot. The last thing she wanted to do was piss off the people she’d have to work with every day. Mechanics, in particular, were in a position to make her life a living hell. From something as simple as putting her repairs at the back of the queue to a more sinister sabotage, like filling her starfighter with itching mites or ship rats.

  Yorra was right. She needed to be more thoughtful. Delicate. “That’s a good point. How would you approach it?”

  ”Well, I’d talk to them, sure, but don't interrogate anyone. Don't isolate them. Speak to them together. Show them you’re on their side. Charm them.”

  “Okay. I’ll try that. Thanks.” She got up to go but hesitated.

  “What is it?” Yorra asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, you just thought of something. Tell me.”

  “You promise to keep this between us?”

  She nodded.

  “You ever heard of something called space madness?”

  “A legend from the Kryl War,” Yorra said. “It happened to pilots who flew too close to a star, or who were exposed to excess radiation when their ship’s shielding broke. Or so I’ve heard.”

  “You know of anyone who caught it?”

  “Not personally. My uncle was a Fleet mechanic back during the Kryl War. He told me a story once. They were on the front, fighting around the planet Fila before the Kryl invaded. A squadron of starfighters had been sent to do recon of a Kryl encampment near the planet’s north pole. The squadron flew the mission, took photos of the encampment—later used to plan an attack—but on their way back, the starfighter pilots were ambushed by Kryl drones. Only one pilot survived. My uncle was on duty when the guy barreled into the hangar. His Sabre was all busted up, so his landing was rather clumsy, but he hadn't said three words when he got out of the cockpit before he went mad. It took ten people to detain him.”

  “Hmm,” Casey said. “Sounds similar. Only, Mick isn’t a pilot. I don’t know how he would have been exposed to the same thing the pilot in your uncle’s story was exposed to—excess radiation or whatever.”

  “Yeah,” Yorra said, “I don’t know. But while Mick was losing it, calling you a xeno, staring around with those bloodshot eyes and grabbing that torch off the wall, all I could think about was my uncle. Even years later, he got this haunted look in his eyes telling us that story. I tried to ask him more about it but my mom said, ‘Chacho, stop it, you’re scaring the kids!’ And that was the end of it.”

  “What happened to that pilot?”

  Yorra’s tongue darted out, wetting her lips. “When I joined the Fleet I looked him up. Took a while, had to make friends with someone who had clearance to view the archives. Records say they were able to detain the pilot, like my uncle told us. They threw him in the brig. Sadly, while an Imperial Inquisitor was en route to the station to determine what to do with him, the pilot committed suicide.”

  “No way.”

  It was no secret that they left you nothing but a pair of athletic shorts and a t-shirt in the brig. Service members causing self-harm in isolation was a frequent enough occurrence early in the war that Fleet security personnel took no risks.

  “How did he do it?” Casey said.

  “The records didn’t say. You hear all sorts of things, though. One rumor is the pilot clawed his own throat out. They found him with a piece of his esophagus clutched in his hand.”

  “Ugh,“ Casey said. “Are you serious?”

  “That’s what I heard. My friend in the archives couldn’t confirm it, though. If they do keep those kind of records, it’s above our pay grade.”

  Casey’s mind recoiled. She didn’t want to believe what Yorra was telling her. She didn't want to believe that it had anything to do with what had happened to Mick. There were too many differences between the stories. Yorra’s uncle hadn’t said anything about this pilot calling people xenos. That pilot had probably just gone mad from seeing his whole squadron killed by the Kryl. Plenty of soldiers lost their minds in the war. Surely, there was some rational explanation.

  “I heard another rumor,” Yorra said. “This is probably nonsense, but since you asked… I heard once that a group of explorers found a Telos artifact on a colony world and got the space madness that way.”

  “But the Telos are just a legend. They died millennia ago, before Ariadne was founded.”

  “And left shrines and ruins scattered across the galaxy. If you believe the legends, the tech they had makes the Solaran Empire look like a bunch of monkeys banging rocks together.”

  Casey chuckled. She’d heard similar stories, but nothing credible. For instance, it was common knowledge that the Great Migration ended when Solarans invented the hyperspace drive. They settled on Ariadne shortly afterward. Some people, however, still believed that Solarans didn’t invent the hyperspace drive at all, but reverse engineered it from a Telos artifact they discovered on their journey.

  All that was ancient history, though. No one had ever seen a Telos before or any of their tech. They’d been extinct for millennia.

  “Anyway,” Yorra said, “The important thing is, don’t go in hot when you’re talking to people. Act normal. Keep your cool. Listen more than you talk.”

  “Thanks for the advice.”

  “Sure. I’m gonna go check on Naab again.”

  “I’ll swing by in a little bit. Remember, not a word of this to anyone.” Casey had kept her promise to Admiral Miyaru, not saying a word about the drone that shot Nevers down or the strange ability the drone used to outmaneuver him. But she didn’t want any rumors about her wagging tongue making their way back to the admiral through back channels.

  “Of course not, Raptor.” Yorra drew her thumb and forefinger across her mouth. “My lips are sealed.”

  Yorra stood and opened the door. Her confident swagger had returned. You wouldn’t know that just a few minutes ago, Casey had found her hiding in here, drinking by herself and trying to control her shaking hands.

  Yorra was right. It had been a rough day for everybody. Before visiting Park, she’d go talk to a few of those mechanics in the hangar, but she’d play it cool. Just a captain asking questions, not a sanctioned Inquisitor.

  Not her father.

  As she walked
with Yorra through the halls, Casey organized in her mind the other stories she’d heard about people who caught the space madness—the plausible ones, not the myths about Telos artifacts.

  Those were just rumors, right? Exaggerated war stories? Misunderstandings? They couldn’t be real.

  Could they?

  Eleven

  The old priest limped out of the ravine. He turned up a game trail that was barely visible in the evening half-light, despite the pinprick stars overhead and the orange gas giant cresting the horizon through a haze.

  At a snap of Elya’s fingers, Hedgebot scurried ahead of them and helped light the way, so his own tired feet, and those of Hedrick, wouldn’t trip on the rubble littering the path. The priest, despite his limping, had no trouble navigating the familiar terrain in the dark.

  Even with the light from his bot and the flashlight Heidi shone forward, Hedrick struck his foot on a rock, stubbed his toe and fell. He lay in the dirt for a while, sobbing into the darkness. Elya recognized it wasn’t because of the pain alone, but rather from the combined weight of everything that had happened to him today. Heidi tried to pick the boy up, but she was too tired and Hedrick didn’t want to get up, so Elya lifted the boy in his arms. Hedrick clasped his wrists around Elya’s neck and buried his wet face into the shoulder of his flight suit, soaking the slick fabric through in an instant. But he stopped struggling and let Elya carry him.

  They rose out of the canyon, took another path, and soon reached a rock wall at a dead end. The priest tapped on the rock in a pattern of raps and pauses. When he stopped, there was a rustling and then a section of stone slid aside, revealing the mouth of a cave lit by warm orange firelight.

  The priests gestured the three of them inside. “Here we are.”

  Elya didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t this. Inside the cave was a semi-permanent camp with twenty to thirty people. Tents of different sizes and shapes, held up with sturdy metal poles, or makeshift wooden ones, had been set around the edge of the cave to create a sense of privacy. The cave arched up high overhead, where stalactites hung from the ceiling, and extended far back beyond the tents, where the shadows deepened.