095: DEFUSE

I stare at Tal for a bit, but no further explanation is forthcoming. “I don’t…?”

“You too, Aspen! All of us are so fucking stupid! I have to try something! If this actually works I’m going to be so pissed off at myself!” Ke spins on kes heel and quickly disappears between the crates.

“Is whatever you figured out important to this mutiny thing?” the captain calls after kem.

“No!”

“Best to leave kem to it, then,” he shrugs. “I’m sure ke’ll tell us what that’s about at a big dramatic speech at breakfast.”

I frown at my arm. “You know you didn’t need to do surgery to lock the airlocks like that, right? You could’ve just done it so it only unlocks for you guys and left us with our chips.”

“Yeah,” Tinera says, “but there’s a scientist, an astronavigator, and an engineer with delusions of grandeur in there. We disabled the HR1 computer terminal, but they could probably repair it and we don’t know how much control Keldin has over messing with ship ranks and protocols even when he’s not captain. It was easiest to just make it so the AI wouldn’t recognise any of you. Of course, now that we know we can trust you, Sunset, Sam and Celi, we can replace – ”

“What are you going to do with Keldin and Heli?” I ask. “Are you going to kill them?”

Captain Klees looks appalled. “No! We’ll just keep them locked up in a Habitation Ring. From what you’ve said, they’re not likely to cause further trouble if we keep them confined and safe. We might have to separate them so that Heli’s not a potential danger to Keldin, but – ”

“And what are you going to do when we reach Hylara?” I ask.

“Yeah, Captain,” Tinera adds in the tone of someone who’s had this conversation before. “What are you going to do when we reach Hylara? It doesn’t matter that all this was self-defence, somehow I still don’t think ‘a bunch of convicts disabled their kill switches and successfully staged a coup’ is going to be a bit of news that’s going to make our new overlords comfortable. Unless you want to try for staying in charge of the terraforming project too? Because I don’t think we’d win that one.”

“I don’t know,” Captain Klees admits, rubbing his temples. “But I’m not going to kill them both and try to hide the fact that any of this happened. That’s what Keldin tried to do!”

“He’ll probably play nice for now,” Tinera says, “but you have to know that Keldin’s already planning how he’s going to give his side of this to the colonists. He’s going to do everything he can to screw us over at Hylara.”

“Put me back in with them,” I say.

“What?”

“Put me back in Habitation Ring 1. Drag your feet on releasing any of us, take your time investigating the incident. Keldin’s usually more reasonable than this; I’ve talked him around before. I think I can do it again. He’s bound to see how utterly ridiculous his mass murder ploy was; if I can find a way to frame this that protects his pride, we might be able to avoid causing a problem at Hylara.”

“You think you can do that?” Captain Klees asks.

I shrug. “I have three and a half years to get it right. It’s worth a try.”

Tinera and the captain exchange a glance.

“I think they should go for it,” Tinera shrugs. “I don’t think it’ll work, but if there’s a chance of stopping that arsehole from causing problems down the line…”

“I don’t like the idea of confining people we know are innocent indefinitely,” Captain Klees says. “We were only locked up for a few days and it absolutely sucked.”

“Yeah, but we were caught up wondering which one of our good friends had just murdered two crewmates and trying to figure out if our lives were in danger. Anyway, Aspen’s volunteering, so – ”

“Sunset, Sam and Celi aren’t. I can’t very well release those three and leave Aspen behind.”

“Yeah, that wouldn’t work,” I agree. “There’s no way that Keldin trusts me at all at this point. That’s just be announcing, ‘hey, here’s a spy!’, and he was actually recruited as a spy for this mission and I wasn’t, so I’d rather not try to match our skills there. Just drag your feet on this investigation as much as you can and I’ll work with whatever time you can buy me.”

“And we can’t exactly explain to the others that we’re dragging our feet on purpose for this,” Adin says.

“Nope. You’ll have to just let them think you’re angry and scared.”

“Yeah, I… would really rather not do that. All three of them have broken bones from fighting Keldin and Heli; I don’t want them together even now.”

“I really don’t think any of us are in further danger,” I say. “And we’re all trapped inside this spaceship anyway; it’s the same thing in a smaller space. If anything happens, you can pull us out, but one thing I learned in my year as captain was that avoiding dangerous or uncomfortable tasks and pushing problems down the road to be dealt with in the nebulous future in the name of promoting stability really doesn’t work. Remember when I procrastinated rousing any engineers for a year and the ship shut the oxygen off?”

“But then we roused Keldin,” Tinera points out, “which, given all this…”

“We probably would’ve picked someone else if we weren’t under the duress of a limited oxygen supply. But my point is. We’re stockpiling a lot of problems that are going to hit us at Hylara. It’s time to at least try to start dealing with them.”

“Alright,” Captain Klees concedes reluctantly. “We’ll leave everyone in HR1 for a bit and you can… see what you can do with Keldin to convince him not to fuck us over in a few years. I don’t see how you’re going to fix this one, though.”

“With time and diplomacy. It’s not like I can make things any worse, right?”

“Things can always get worse,” Tinera says, only half joking.

“Hmm.” Captain Klees rubs his temples. “Alright. Tinera, escort Aspen back to the habitation ring and bring me Sam. I want their perspective on this event, and we might as well have them do the navigator’s routine course check.”

“You got it, Captain.” Tinera gives Captain Klees a jovial little salute, and I’m struck with the unavoidable fact that this woman murdered a thirteen year old boy in his sleep and told us all that he deserved it. Our logistics officer murdered a child in his sleep and stabbed his mother, and one of our doctors was an illegal organ harvester that seems to have been killing her cancer patients for their organs, and the other doctor unquestioningly handed a patient suicide drugs upon request and that patient died murdering our psychologist for as-yet-unknown reasons and I’m about to go and try to make friends with the man who just tried to kill almost all of my friends and a couple of years ago (and nearly forty years ago and about eighty years ago) I threatened to kill a man over the death of my sister and only escaped a criminal trial because ‘author of those books we keep using to drum up publicity for the Javelin Project accuses Javelin Project CEO of assassinating political opponent’ makes for terrible PR. And I’m starting to think that every single person on this ship is the absolute worst choice for building a new human society at a distant star.

Tinera leads me back into the ring and takes Sam. The other prisoners are standing around in a small group, talking, and I stride right over and slap Keldin across the face before any of them can react.

“You tried to murder six people under your protection to protect your pride and your rank on this ship!” I yell at him. “You arsehole!”

(Before re-establishing a positive relationship with someone, it’s important to clear the air.)

“Oh, like how you killed an entire chronostasis ring of colonists under your protection to protect your pride?”

“That’s not the same thi – ”

“Why, because you didn’t have to look at their faces first?”

“Whoah, hey,” Heli says, stepping between us, and I back away because I don’t want to be thrown into any more furniture today. “What’s all this ab – ?”

“Shut up,” I snap at her from out of her reach. “I can’t believe you’re only the second worst person in this ring right now. Do you realise how sad that is?” I lean on the wall of the nearest bedroom, dizzy with rage.

Keldin raises his hands. “Now, whatever they just told you – ”

“They don’t have a reason to lie to me,” I snap, “unlike you. Do you guys want to know who the murderer was? Want the secret to the Big Mystery?”

“Aspen, I – ”

I tell them. I explain what we know, how we think the killing took place, and what we surmised to be the reasons for Keldin’s murder attempts. And the expression on his face confirms that I’m right.

There’s an immediate uproar. Heli raises both hands and tries to yell for calm and Keldin, of all people, punches her in the face. She goes down, presumably more out of surprise than anything. She looks a bit dizzy.

I’m feeling a bit dizzy, too. It might be a side effect of whatever it was that Lina stuck us with in the medbay.

“You need to shut the fuck up!” He screams at her. “You’re worse than any of those people!”

“Who, those people you just tried to kill for no good reason? I’m one of the very few people in this fucking crew who’s never tried to kill anybody!”

“Babes, babes, calm down!” Sunset says. “You’re both utterly terrible examples of humanity that the universe would be better off without! It’s not a competition.”

Heli doesn’t get up. She sits on the floor, blinking dazedly. Celi slumps heavily against a wall. Even Sunset and Keldin seem to be running out of steam pretty quickly, and I’m really, really tired. Heli closes her eyes, and I figure that that’s probably a good idea.

But if we were getting side effects from the meds, they wouldn’t… hit us all at the same time, right? Because of different metabolisms. And that. And Lina and the Friend are sticklers for medical observation, so if there were side effects, they… we’d be in the… the room with beds and stuff.

I’m on the floor now, and I’m too tired to think. I’ll solve this mystery after a nap. Yeah.