076: TIES

“I’m sure I don’t need to explain how serious an issue this is,” Captain Sands says, pacing back and forth in front of Tinera and Heli. “We simply cannot have physical violence on this ship. Our lives depend on each other every single day, not to mention the lives of the chronostatic colonists. We shouldn’t even be in a position where I have to explain that attacking crewmates for being rude to you is simply not permissable.”

“Yes, sir.” Tinera’s voice is completely calm. I get the sense that she’s been dressed down like this before. She doesn’t look at the rest of the crew, gathered around the room. She doesn’t look at Heli, rubbing her sore face and pointedly not looking at Tinera either.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“No, sir.”

“No? Not even going to try to justify your actions?”

“No, sir.”

“Captain,” Denish speaks up, “I know this is not good situation, but Tinera meant well.”

“Oh, she meant well? Mr Calhurn, if Miss Li Null was capable of judging appropriate actions for ‘meaning well’, she would not be on this ship in the first place, and neither, to put too fine a point on it, would you. You’ll excuse me if I’m not comforted by the knowledge that members of this crew that contains three people convicted of murder at least ‘mean well’ when they start randomly attacking people!”

Denish’s face reddens and he mutters something in Texan.

“Speak properly!” Captain Sands snaps. “You’ve been speaking the Interlingua on this ship for almost a year and a half now, surely you can communicate a basic sentence by now!”

“He said,” a Public Universal Friend (the doctor one) says coldly, “that he was convicted of manslaughter. Not murder. And while we’re on the topic, this friend was convicted of mass murder. If you are going to bring up our crimes, at least be accurate about it.”

“Right, of course; silly me. And how many people was it that you killed, again?”

“Are you asking how many this Friend killed, or how many it was convicted for?”

“Which is the bigger number?”

“Guess,” it says, with a little smile.

“Um,” I say, “sorry to interrupt, Captain, but the topic at hand…?”

“Yes. Of course. My apologies. Tinera, Heli; either of you want to add any information here that might make this little altercation make a little bit of sense?”

“No, sir.”

Heli shakes her head.

“Not even going to pretend it was her fault, Tinera? You’re just straight up admitting that she was rude to you and you lost it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fine. Tal, is there a way to confine a crew member to a specific ring in the ship while still allowing everyone else to move freely through the ring?”

“Oh, yeah; that’s easy. You just have to be the captain and tell Amy to lock the airlocks whenever – ”

“Great, show me how to do it. Tinera, you’re confined to Habitation Ring 2 for the immediate future. I’ll get to work on a schedule distributing her duties to the rest of us for the next few days, until we revive more crew members to help. You’ll have regular sessions with the senior psychologist and will be released and returned to active duty only once he has determined – ”

“You trust the Lyson Project guy to make that call?!” Tinera interrupts, her calm facade cracking.

“Well if that bothers you so much, perhaps you should’ve waited an extra few days for me to revive a new psychologist before you decided to assault another member of this crew,” Captain Sands snaps. “To clarify, this isn’t disciplinary, it’s just damage control. I’ll decide on appropriate disciplinary measures after we’ve dealt with the immediate issues of Renn’s Kinoshita report and reviving the new crew members. Crew dismissed. Tinera, go to your habitation ring. Tal, show me how the airlock lock trick works.”

The crew slowly disperse. I don’t move for a minute, head reeling with new information. I’d known that Tinera had killed before, but three killers in the crew? Denish… well, that makes sense. There’s lots of ways for a space pirate to accidentally get somebody killed; both space and piracy are dangerous. No surprises there. But how can somebody be a Public Universal Friend and a doctor and commit mass murder? Everything in the Friend’s demeanour had suggested that it was guilty; it had even implied more murders that it wasn’t convicted of. Everything I learn about the old crew makes it harder to resist asking for information about them that they don’t want to give.

This also raises uncomfortable questions about Tinera’s previous victim. She’d always insisted that he ‘deserved it’, without elaboration, and I’d always taken her word on that. But she broke Heli’s arm and teeth over some rudely invasive questions, which sort of calls her judgement into question over what someone needs to do to deserve physical violence. Maybe I should have pushed for answers from the crew. Maybe I should have let Captain Sands tell me, instead of consistently refusing to hear.

Maybe I should go and look them up right now. I can do it. It’s information that the Logistics Officer has clearance for. I could march off to the nearest terminal and have all of their criminal records pulled right up on the screen.

I could, but I don’t.

Later that night, I sit at one of the picnic tables in Recreation and Medical Ring 1 sharing a bottle of Tinera’s terrible homemade wine with Captain Sands.

“Did I do the right thing?” he asks. “Confining her to quarters like that?”

I blink in surprise. Captain Sands wants to play with kid gloves with the convicts now? Of all people? “Um, yes. It’s literally the least you could do. If she’s on that much of a hair trigger, she can’t just be walking around the ship.”

“That’s not what I meant.” He sips his wine and scrunches up his entire face in disgust. (Somehow, Tarandran genetic engineering makes even his disgusted grimace look attractive. Stars, I need to have sex with someone before this gets properly distracting.) “I meant, the other convicts sleep in there. What if she attacks one of them?”

“Why would she do that? We all lived together for ages, and until now, there’s never been any kind of violence. Heli wakes up and she hits her almost right away. I’m sure it’s a personal compatibility issue; there’s no way she’ll hurt any of her old friends.”

“Until this morning, I would’ve said that I was sure she wouldn’t hit anyone. And yet here we are.”

I raise my eyebrows. “Weren’t you keeping their quarters separate because you thought they would?”

“As captain, I had to prepare for the possibility that they would. That’s part of my job. I never expected someone to prove me right.” He sips his wine again. “She really isn’t good at making this stuff, is she?”

“Still better than anyone else’s attempts,” I shrug, sipping my own and immediately wishing I hadn’t. 

“Well, friendships aside, now that we have a known dangerous element in our midst I’d rather not expose vulnerable crew members to more danger than necessary. When designing this peaceful interstellar spaceship with a highly trained and responsible crew, the Powers That Be didn’t see fit to equip it with a brig, so it’s not like I can just conveniently lock her away somewhere else; locking her in a ring not designed for normal human living would just create more problems than it would solve. So tomorrow I’m going to have all the rest of the crew move up to our habitation ring. Habitation Ring 2 can be our brig as needed.”

“You’re not still worried that the other big scary convicts might pose a threat to your poor innocent civilian crew members?”

Sands lifts an eyebrow. “You want to do this now? Right after Tinera? Really?”

“Just curious about your thought process.”

“The others haven’t done anything to be concerned about. Separating them made sense as a precaution, but it’s not something we have the space for any longer. I’d rather protect the whole crew from a known unstable element than put half of it at risk to protect the other half from vague, potential dangers. I still have no idea what to do about Tinera long-term, though. How do we stop this from happening again?”

“I don’t understand how it happened this time,” I say. “I mean, she doesn’t seem the type.”

“Aspen, you yourself have described her as impulsive, aggressive, and incapable of regret. She’s killed before. She absolutely is the type.”

“Yeah, I know all that, it just…”

“It hurts to be disappointed by somebody you put your faith in.”

“No, that’s not it.”

“It’s not?”

I shake my head. “Did you notice how she didn’t put up any kind of an argument? Didn’t even try to put some of the responsibility on Heli, accepted your judgement, didn’t provide any further explanation when you gave her ample opportunity to do so?”

“She didn’t defend herself because her actions were indefensible.”

“But she thought it was a good enough reason to attack her, see? She must have thought they were justified, at least in the moment, or she wouldn’t have done it. And yet, she didn’t try to explain, didn’t argue at all.” I swirl my wine glass thoughtfully. “I’ve seen that before. When I was captain, I didn’t do what you did; I didn’t immediately go looking into the crew’s past. I had some suspicions that some of them might be convicts, but I had no idea that they all were for ages. But they thought I knew, and they thought I was an active danger to them, because of the kill switch thing, so until they learned to trust me, they behaved… well. They’d debate and banter and be normal and stuff, but if I made a decision that they wanted me to make, that they thought kept them safe, all debate would stop. If I got close to something that they didn’t want me close to, and then I got distracted or reached a wrong conclusion, they’d agree and not provide further information. If there’s one thing that you can say these people are excellent at, it’s handling prison guards.”

“I’m not their prison guard!”

“Aren’t you, though? You micromanage their schedules while you leave the rest of us alone, and don’t think nobody notices that they do twice as much work as the rest of us. You put them and us non-convicts in separate habitation rings for ‘safety’. You don’t trust Adin or his doctor to make proper healthcare decisions, and you had me spy on a life-saving operation in case the doctors did some unspecified bad thing that even you couldn’t justify or explain.”

“That isn’t – as a captain I have to be cautious, as this incident proves!”

“And as people under your command, so do they. To them, your power and your bias makes you dangerous, and they’re well versed and handling dangerous people. That’s all I’m saying.”

“So how do you think they’re ‘handling’ me?”

“I don’t know. All I know here is that based on Tinera’s behaviour, this situation is more complicated than it appears. We’ve all asked Tinera invasive questions about her hand and why she refused to get it replaced before; several crewmates have brought it up in emotionally charged arguments with her before. Something else happened here, something personal between her and Heli. So I think she’s safe around other crewmates, because whatever it is, it’s only happened with Heli, who hasn’t been awake all that long.”

“How do you know it’s something personal to them?”

“Because Heli’s keeping quiet about it, too.”

“Hmm. I’ll keep this in mind when evaluation how dangerous she might be in the future. Thanks for your insight, Aspen.”

“No problem.” I swig the rest of my wine back. It must have far more alcohol in it than I thought, because for some completely unexplainable reason the next words out of my mouth are, “Hey, do you want to have sex?”

Captain Sands stares at me in open surprise, which, yeah, that’s a fair enough reaction. I feel my cheeks warming up.

“Um,” I say. “Sorry, my timing here is completely inappropriate. I’ll just go.”

“No, it’s… you’re very attractive, Aspen, but for future reference, the answer is always going to be ‘no’. I’m not really in a position where I can do that with you.”

“Hey, sure, that’s totally fair. Some cultures have a ‘not with your subordinates’ rule, I get it.” (I know for a fact that sex with subordinates is not a taboo in Tarandran culture, but if he wants to protect my ego while letting me down then I’m not about to stop him.) “Just for the record, though, I wasn’t proposing a change to our relationship. I was suggesting what the Lunari call a ‘nosoke’.”

“Yes, yes; I understand that. It’s just that I’m already spoken for.”

“You are?!” Captain Sands, dating one of the crew? When did that happen? It’s not completely impossible – most of the crew, including Sands, are from pair-bonding cultures – but I can’t believe I didn’t notice. First Adin and Heli, and now this. I really need to pay more attention to what’s happening around me.

“Not one of the crew,” he says hurriedly, as if this is some horrible rumour that I’m about to spread around for the sole purpose of sowing confusion and chaos.

“Oh,” I say, more solemnly. He left someone behind on Earth, then. Someone who must be long dead by now, but from his perspective, it hasn’t been that long. I can’t fault him for still holding to his agreement with them.

“He’s in Chronostasis Ring 3,” Sands says.

What?

“He’s aboard the ship?”

“I wasn’t about to leave him behind.”

“You can’t… we weren’t allowed to bring family. Or mementos, or anything.”

“And when has that ever worked, historically? Humans have always migrated to new lands as families, unless somebody forced them to do otherwise. The whole ‘no attachments’ rule in the Javelin Program is preposterous. And there’s always a way around such rules. I’m sure we’re not the only ones who managed it.”

“Well. Congratulations, I guess. Um. What are his chances of… ?”

“Sixty eight per cent.”

“That’s… a pretty high revival chance. You know, relatively speaking.”

“Yes. Relatively speaking.”

We sit in silence for a bit.

“You know,” I say, “his chances aren’t going to improve with time.”

“Yes, but they’re not going down, either.”

“Still, have you considered – ?”

“No. I’m not going to wake him up until we get to Hylara. Even if it’s hard, even if I’ll be four years older.”

“Why not?”

“Because if he doesn’t wake up, I won’t be able to cope. I just won’t. And I can’t break down right now. This ship is depending on me holding it together, and if he dies, I won’t. On Hylara, when somebody else is in charge and lives don’t depend on my stability, then I’ll have the chance to find out whether I get my happily ever after or not. But a nearly one-third chance of losing him… I can’t think about it right now, and I certainly can’t let it happen right now.”

“Well,” I say, holding up my empty glass, “here’s to your happily ever after.”

He holds up his own glass, sips his wine, and then grimaces again. “Okay, we absolutely need to revive someone who knows how to ferment properly.”

“The most important role on a spaceship,” I agree.