073: TRUST

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“Hi, Captain,” I say cautiously. “Everything alright?”

His expression clears quickly, so quickly that I might almost think I’d imagined it. Almost. “Completely fine, Aspen. How are you?”

“Also fine. What are you up to?”

“Just enjoying a quiet coffee.” He takes a sip from his cup.

“Alone? Hanging out in one of the creepy rooms where you can expect people not to be, instead of in a chair or a garden or something?”

“I just got a bit lost in thought. I should go and get some work done – ”

“You’re on a mandated holiday just like the rest of us. Captain, have you spoken to Renn?”

“I think he’s in one of the network rings. What do you need him for?”

“No, no. I mean, have you spoken to Renn as your mental health professional.”

Captain Sands sighs and sips his coffee again. “He’s likely to be fairly busy right now. What with the… recent discoveries.”

He has a point. The genetically engineered crew obviously need to have priority access to Renn’s skills. Whatever problems the rest of us have can probably wait. But…

“You have a more stressful job than any of us,” I point out. “You might have escaped this genetic engineering thing, but people under your care didn’t. And you need to make more decisions than the rest of us when it comes to keeping crew and colonists safe; all these problems and unpleasant new facts that keep cropping up might affect some people more strongly than you but at least everyone else only needs to deal with a few of them at a time. All of them are your problem. And if one of us breaks down, that doesn’t necessarily have to be a big deal, they can take a leave or whatever, but if you break down? If we can’t rely on your decisions any more? Then we’re all in serious trouble. It’s your responsibility to keep on top of your mental health.”

I worry that the flattery about how oh so important his command decisions are might be a bit much, but no; Captain Sands’ shoulders slump and he sits on a chronostasis pod. I’m shocked for a second – you can’t just sit on someone like that – until I realise that the pod’s empty.

“Renn has plenty of work already. I’m fine.”

An obvious lie. But the question is, is he genuinely trying to be mindful of Renn’s time, or does he just not want to talk to a mental health professional?

Or, perhaps, does he just not want to talk to Renn?

“You know,” I try, “I’m not a psychologist, but I am the assistant psychologist aboard this ship. If you want to talk…”

“You’re on a mandated holiday,” he says, throwing my words back at me.

“If you want to talk to a friend, then.”

He shoots me a searching look. “Are we friends, Aspen?”

Good fucking question. I sit on the empty pod beside him. “I hope so. I mean, it’d be best if we all tried to be friends, right? We have to work together in isolation for a few years yet.”

“And what do you think of our new friends? The new crew members.”

I shrug. “They seem fine? I mean, stressed out, obviously, but – ”

“Do you trust them?”

“… Trust them? Like, in general?”

“I suppose so.”

I shrug. “Sure? Is there a problem? Did something else go wrong?”

“No, no; I’m sure it’s all fine. It’s just been a stressful time for everyone.” He sips his coffee. “Why are you here, Aspen?”

“I was walking through and you looked all sad? If you’d rather sulk alone – ”

“I mean, why are you aboard the Courageous? Especially after your incident on the Capricorn Plateau with – ”

“How did you know about that?!”

“It was all over the news. When a public figure gets deported from a nation in such a dramatic fashion, it’s something that people tend to talk about.”

“No one else on the crew’s mentioned it.”

“Half of them were in prison at the time and the other half woke up and didn’t recognise your name. So it’s probably not the kind of news they’d remember. Why did you throw your old life away for this?”

I shrug. “You know how it is. Got bit by the expansion bug. Happens to all sorts of people. You’re here; why is a Javelin Program engine designer a colonist for a new world?”

“I was actually only on the Javelin Program for about six months, you know.”

I stare in surprise. “But you’re so good at fixing everything!”

“At doing my job? Yeah, I can read blueprints. They’re all in the computer. Any astroengineer could do it. You’re just comparing me to Denish and I’d bet my pants that that man didn’t spend a day in engineering school. No, I used to troubleshoot engines for small transport spaceships. Then one day on my lunch break, I’m sitting in a cafe and skimming for something to read, and I come across From Africa To The Stars.” He smiles wistfully at his coffee. “It just completely changed my perspective on human history and our future. I read all of your other books within a week and got a job designing for the javelins the next month. I just knew that I had to be a part of this, possibly the most defining step in our future.”

Oh. This… explains a lot, actually.

After Captain Sands had woken up, I was the only person he really seemed to trust. There’s an explanation for that – everyone else was a criminal. Fine. But I had expected him to replace me as Logistics Officer the moment he had better qualified non-convicts for it, and he hadn’t. Maybe he needs more time to get to know them, fine – but he kept trusting me and relying on me even though we constantly butted heads on multiple important issues, most notably the treatment and trust of the old crew. I hadn’t really been able to figure it out before right now.

I’m not dealing with some guy who grabbed me as the best of a bunch of bad options. I’m dealing with a fan.

“When I woke up,” Captain Sands continues, “it sort of made sense that you’d be on a javelin. I mean, who can write so eloquently about the Exodus Phenomenon and not fall victim to it?”

“Yeah, it grabs people,” I sigh. I remember marching up to the offices in a sort of mania and demanding to be put through the screening process. An unconquerable urge to be out there, to be away.

“But reviewing your time as captain, it pretty quickly became clear that you’re not all that goal-oriented on getting to Hylara.”

“Hey,” I say, “I did absolutely everything I – ”

He raises the hand not holding coffee in a placating gesture. “Sorry, I phrased that badly. I just meant… look, you did an admirable job holding this broken ship together with a skeleton crew. But that’s sort of my point. You kept an untrained skeleton crew for as long as you possibly could, until something life-critical broke. You figured out exactly as much about the dying colonists as you figured you needed to know for safety and refused to take risks with anybody’s lived to push further. Your perspective was on the here and now, on helping the people in front of you, and it still always is; you don’t seem to be all that excited about the future, about Hylara. And that confuses me. The convicts I get, but you chose to be here. I’m trying to figure out why.”

He’s watching me carefully, his expression… interrogative? Am I being accused of something? There’s something going on here, something he’s trying to dig up, some layer to this conversation that I don’t understand.

And you know what? I don’t care. I just stopped to see if he was alright. If he has a problem with me, he can use his big boy words rather than talking around the issue.

“Why didn’t you wake the crew?” I ask.

He blinks. “What?”

“The first crew of the Courageous. Some of them are dead, but most of them are in chronostasis. Now, when I woke up, I made the admittedly unwise decision of going at this alone, and when I needed to revive someone, I wasn’t really thinking all that clearly at the time. I just listed colonists by their priority as a replacement doctor and it hadn’t really occurred to me that the first crew doctors would be available and not on the list. When it came to reviving the rest of the old crew, well, we were mostly aiming to rescue people from dangerous chronostasis; the ability to perform specific jobs wasn’t a concern.” (And the Friend, worrying about possible mistreatment, had made sure we only roused other prisoners as much as it could, but that’s not worth getting into.) “But you, when you became captain, you decided to staff this ship with a proper crew, as skilled as possible, and you had the time and the intelligence to think through it. So why wasn’t Captain Sienna Kae Jin or any of her living crewmates on your list? There’s no way you didn’t consider them.”

“That’s not important. I just want to know – ”

“Worried to lose your shiny new command to a more competent candidate? If you’re being so forward-thinking about the future of Hylara, then – ”

Captain Sands stands up quickly. “I have work to do.” He stalks off.

Okay. Yeah. I probably shouldn’t have brought that up. Accusing the captain of putting us at risk with less competent leadership and crewmates just to support his own vanity might be very definitely accurate, but hardly diplomatic. But it did stop him asking me weird personal questions. So. Good.

I head on to check the next set of cryofreezers.

The two Public Universal Friends are in Storage Ring 3, and they’re doing… something. Looking through a storage box and collecting several items. They barely look at each other and don’t make small talk while they work; if it was anyone else I’d assume they didn’t like each other, but I’ve seen Friends work together before. I know they’re just like this.

There’s nothing in the cryofreezers. I move on. I check every cryofreezer in the ship, but none of them have Rynn-Hatson’s incubators.

Which, again, doesn’t tell me a whole lot. Maybe there are no more incubators for other rings, or maybe they’re hidden in some storage container somewhere with the bacteria in the cryofreezer deliberately mislabelled, and even if we do turn up more incubators they might simply be spares so it doesn’t guarantee that more rings were to be infected. Whatever. It was just an idle thought.

I run into Tinera as I pass through her habitation ring. (I miss living in this habitation ring. Everything seemed simpler then.) “Hey, Tiny,” I call. “Can I get some of your least disgusting booze?”

“No can do, I’m afraid. All of my booze is disgusting; you know that.”

“Well can I get some of your nearest and most accessible booze?”

“There’s some in that unused bedroom over there.”

I grab two bottles of Badly Home-Fermented Alcohol from the unused bedroom that’s apparently playing the role of alcohol storage room, hand one to Tinera, and eventually wrest the cap off the other with my half-numb arm. I take a big swig and cough immediately. It’s like drinking kerosine. “How are you still so bad at this after so long?” I gasp.

She shrugs and swigs her own. “It takes time to ferment. I haven’t actually made all that many batches. Rough day.”

“Is there something in the air, do you think? Some kind of persistent fungal spore or something from those old gross filters, something we never completely got out of the system, that gets into the brains of captains and makes them totally fucking paranoid?”

“Oh, no. Is Sands off in one of his Can’t Trust Convicts moods again?”

“Just the opposite. He asked me if I trusted the new crew today.”

“Trusted them to do what?”

“I don’t know. Just in general. And then he started interrogating me about why I joined the Javelin program.” I take a more cautious sip from my bottle. Caution doesn’t help. “I mean, first Reimann starts locking up computer systems and hides in own severed arm in the fucking wall instead of calling for a doctor and then goes axe-murderer on a bunch of brainjacked colonists, then it’s my turn to be captain and I’m all tied up in knots certain that you guys are keeping secrets from me, and now Sands has been here just a few months and he’s already asking me about trusting crewmates. It’s a dangerous pattern.”

“In Reimann’s defense, he was right,” Tinera points out.

“Well, sure, about the AI brainjacking, but his clear lack of trust in his crew is – ”

“Probably indicative of traitors in the crew. Rynn-Hatson must have had allies.”

“Not necessarily. Anyway, he was part of Kae Jin’s crew, not Reimann’s.”

“The engineers disassembled and combed over chronostasis pods and they match the specs exactly.”

“So?”

“So, there’s no way for the AI to detect which pods are contaminated with genetic engineering bacteria. The AI has to be told which brains it can hijack. Rynn-Hatson died modifying the feeds to CR5; there are both contaminated and uncontaminated pods in there because he didn’t finish the job. But all of the shut down chronostasis fields are in contaminated pods, remember? Meaning that someone must have given the computer clearance after Rynn-Hatson died. They could’ve been on either crew, but given how late in the project Rynn-Hatson’s actions were, they were probably on the second crew. You’d want someone awake for the second half to monitor the actual experiment, right?”

“… Yeah. I guess.”

“And you were right, too. We were hiding our quest to deactivate our kill switches from you. So maybe our Captain’s the only paranoid one.”

Unless he’s also right, we don’t say. The only reason I can think of that a Hylara colonist couldn’t be ‘trusted’ in a situation like this is if they’re an anti-expansionist terrorist, here to destroy the colony. Had Sands come across something that suggested that? Maybe I shouldn’t have provoked him until he’d stormed off.

Well, if he’s that worried, I’m sure he’ll tell me about it when he’s calmed down.

That night, I can’t get to sleep. My conversation with Captain Sands rings in my head. “Why are you here, Aspen?”

It was a good fucking question.

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