100: CAPTAIN

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While I wait for my next client, I grab a notepad and run some numbers.

There are two thousand, nine hundred and eighty six colonists still in chronostasis, out of an original five thousand. That includes the survivors of the original crew. They have an average revival rate of… well, I don’t know how to look it up without Amy, but let’s say sixty eight per cent. Plus eight current crew. Assuming no further problems, no more disasters or deaths or nasty new experimental surprises, we should end up with a colony of about two thousand and thirty eight people at Hylara.

Two thousand and thirty eight people. To colonise a planet.

It’s not impossible. There are tens of thousands of geneblanked human embryos in storage, with millions of DNA sets ready to insert and the ability to synthesise new sets from the database if needed. We have no fear of a genetic bottleneck so long as the storage rings aren’t compromised, and if we find ourselves lacking people able to incubate fetuses for some reason, there are the artificial wombs – not ideal, given the failure rate, but usable. A dozen people could set up the colony, given infinite time – which we presumably have. Two people could do it, if they were very, very careful to never take any risks with themselves.

What a larger workforce promises is speed. Faster base setup, faster population growth if desired, broader cultural base, a safety buffer so that some colonists are more likely to survive if something starts killing us off. A large chronostatic workforce promises flexibility – you can rouse more people as the base’s ability to support them grows, getting yourself working-age labourers and professionals without needing to invest the time and resources into having kids and watching them grow up. You have room for another person? Bam. One week’s recovery and you have another worker, to expand the base even faster.

So two thousand colonists isn’t terrible. We can do it with those, no problem.

But. We’d started out with five thousand, at ninety eight per cent revival, plus a crew of twenty one. There were supposed to be four thousand, eight hundred and twenty one survivors.

Not two thousand.

And with more than three years still left to go, how many more will we lose?

I put the paper aside as Captain Klees comes in and sits on the end of a bed, shoulders slumped. “How are you doing?” he asks. “With all the blood?”

“It’s regenerating just fine. How are you feeling?”

He takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly. “How did you manage it?”

“Being captain? By winging it, mostly. I think you’re doing great, if that helps.”

He laughs quietly, humourlessly. “I got half the crew killed on my first day.”

“That part was in no way, shape or form your fault. This ship is a wreck. Some system failures aren’t in our control.”

“I let Tal run off to mess with the AI without even asking what ke was doing. If I had’ve asked, there was no way I would’ve cleared just giving atmospheric controls back to the AI; that was obviously dangerous. And we all know Tal well enough to know that ke does stuff like that without thinking. I should’ve insisted on an explanation and cleared the action. I screwed up.”

No, I screwed up, I want to say. I couldn’t keep my head in the game when I was captain, I let the place get rundown until it put us in a critical situation. I chose to wake Sands, who was the correct choice, but I chose to make him captain, which wasn’t. He probably would’ve been a great asset to the team – socially annoying and with bad opinions, yes, but the crew has plenty of that – if I hadn’t thrust captaincy on a completely unknown person with untested competency and newly awoken in a terrifying situation that he had no experience in, unlike the rest of us. Because I wanted to ‘play fair’. Because I wanted to have a social circle, not a crew. Because I wanted somebody, anybody, to take the responsibility off my shoulders, and the new engineer was the only viable target, and I gambled with all of our welfare on it and lost.

But I don’t say any of that. My job is to help Captain Klees, not throw a pity party. And ‘things that happen on your watch are solely your fault’ is the opposite of the mindset I need to promote right now.

Instead, I just shrug. “Tal’s always messing with the computers. Trying to reign in and learn about that AI was kes job, and neither me nor Sands second-guessed ke’s weird experiments, either. Ke happened to realise ke could use Reimann’s chip on your watch. It could’ve happened at any time. Bad luck.”

“Bad luck.” He tries a smile. It’s a tired one. I’m struck with a sudden, sharp longing for the Adin Klees of a year ago, on whom that smile would be shy and uncertain and happy. An Adin from before Sands, and Heli, and the deaths of Renn and the friend, and before this burden was placed on his shoulders.

That old smile will be back. I know it will. This man has gone through too much in his life for these specific events to break him; he came out of the Texan prison system as the man I’d met, and presumably he still was, under the stress and regret. He’ll smile like that again eventually.

But we have to get through this, first.

“Do you ever think we got off lightly?” Captain Klees asks, and then looks distraught, face flushed, like he didn’t mean to say it.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I just. I can’t help feeling… I mean. Obviously it’s awful that so many people died. We all lost friends in there. We all lost crew in there. But I just… I can’t stop…” He takes a deep breath. Lets it out slowly. “Heli Graf and Keldin Sands were a problem. They were going to be a problem, a really serious problem, when we got to Hylara, no matter how we tried to mitigate it. When you think about it, that other Friend was a problem, too; someone willing to kill a fellow crew member over a political difference like that, that could’ve gone so much worse. And Renn Sunn might’ve been a problem at Hylara too, if there are enough people like him in chronostasis. We lost good people – we almost lost you! – but looking back, operationally, I also can’t help feeling a little bit…” he shrugs, and stops talking.

I don’t need him to finish; I know what he means. A little bit relieved. Relieved that the problem is out of our hands, neatly solved.

Except it’s not, really. One of my surviving crewmates killed a teenager and stabbed his mother in what seems to have been a botched robbery. Another apparently killed people and harvested their organs. And I feel stable, but I’m also the kind of person who, under enough emotional stress, will break into a building and hold an innocent man at knifepoint under the assumption he might’ve killed my sister.

And we have three rings’ worth of chronostatic colonists left. If the dispositions of the crew are any kind of representative sample…

No, Keldin and Heli’s deaths don’t solve anything. They just push the problems we will have to face back under the rug, because we no longer have to face them right this minute. There must still be Keldins and Helis and Friends in chronostasis, and we haven’t actually got a plan to deal with them.

“Grief is complicated,” I say.

Captain Klees shrugs.

I cast out for something to help with the situation (what am I supposed to say? ‘It’s good to be a little bit happy that some of the people under your care died?’), and strike on a memory of a conversation with Renn. “We should have a funeral,” I say.

Captain Klees looks up, eyes lighting up in a way that I haven’t seen for a long time. “A funeral! Yes, of course we should! That’s so obvious; why didn’t I think of it? I can’t believe I didn’t suggest a funeral!”

Probably because we usually just shove the dead in the corpse freezer. But this was different; these were crewmates. “You should suggest it now.”

“Yes! We’ll have a funeral! Thanks, Aspen!”

“Any time, captain,” I say, but he’s already rushing out of the room. Maybe it’ll be enough of a distraction for him to keep him on-track until everything’s more stable. Maybe it won’t.

Taproot and stars, I wish we had a real psychologist. Someone trained in clinical practice. And not a fan of Lyson projects. I have no fucking idea what I’m doing.

My next patient is the Public Universal Friend, and trying to psyche that is like trying to psyche a brick wall. Part of it might just be the feelings the Friend is incapable of, but I spend most of the session with the sneaking suspicion that it is trying not to burden me with its problems, which is, frankly, unhelpful. It’s not something I can do anything about, though.

“Why did you confess?” I find myself asking, mid-appointment.

“Hmm?”

“Before you figured out that the other Friend was responsible for the deaths. You tried to take the blame. Why?”

“Why did you clean the fingerprints off the knife?”

“I was… emotionally confused. With emotional ties that you don’t have. So. Why confess?”

“It seemed like the safest course of action. This Friend had determined that a drawn-out investigation would cause paranoia and likely further harm; a loss of group cohesion at the very least. And the perpetrator would very likely be killed, which may or may not be reasonable to prevent further harm, but since the damage had already been done – ”

“We had no way of knowing that the damage had already been done! We could be pretty certain that none of us old crew would hurt each other, yeah, but said perpetrator had killed two crew members and all possible reasons for doing so were stupid reasons. How could you know they wouldn’t kill someone else for equally stupid reasons?”

When the Friend blushes, it’s far more obvious than normal, due to its skin tone. It looks away. “In this Friend’s defence, its brain was literally swelling at the time. Such a thing can affect reasoning.”

It probably would’ve been able to make a halfway convincing confession if it hadn’t been sick, too. “And you’re alright there? No relapses?”

It shakes its head. “No further problems. This Friend is on strict alert and prepared to administer medication at the first sign of symptoms.”

“And you have enough?”

“This ship is very well supplied with medication. And said medication is a safer and more targeted version of neurostims, anyway.”

Which we have a ridiculous supply of, according to Captain Klees. Enough to supply the ship’s full convict labour force. Still chilling to think about. We wrap up, and the Friend heads out, leaving me worrying that I haven’t managed to actually help it at all.

And that just leaves the last of the four patients on my ticket. Lina.

But not today, because today, I’m on Lina’s ticket. Two completely unqualified psychologists psyching each other. Absolutely terrible arrangement.

But that’s not my main problem with Lina being my psychologist right now.

She sits on the bed across from mine, her gaze sweeping over my expression, and then sighs. “I’m not going to be able to help you, am I?”

“Probably not.”

She nods. “I’ll inform Captain Klees that we need a third. We can’t do each other.”

“Was Sands right?” I ask. “About your past.”

“We’ve already had this conversation, Aspen.”

“No! We haven’t! You dodged it.”

“Because it doesn’t matter! We agreed on the outset that our pasts don’t matter.”

My hands hurt. I’m clenching them into fists, I realise dimly, driving the poorly maintained ends of my nails into my palms. “So he was right, then.”

“I can’t say for certain. He never spoke to me about it directly. I can say that my conviction records in the computer were accurate.”

“Organ trafficking.”

“Yes.”

“Of organs usually wrecked by extended chemotherapy.”

“Yes.”

“And your patients tended to die really early in said chemotherapy.”

“Not all of them.”

“Oh, not all of them! Well that’s fine, then! Just… just tell me how this all makes sense, alright? Because the details I’m getting so far, they just don’t fit. I know you’re not a bad person.”

She gives me a confused look. “What on earth makes you think I’m not a bad person?”

I don’t have anything to say to that.

“Is there any possible explanation that would make you feel better about me?”

“Yes. I think? Maybe?”

“Well, when you think of one, just imagine that I said that.” She gets up. “You’re cleared to leave the medbay, by the way. Take it easy and rest if you experience and dizziness, and stay on the iron supplements I gave you for two weeks. I’ll inform Captain Klees that we need a third psychologist.”

And then she just leaves.

Well, then. Cleared to leave the medbay. Cleared to be up and about. Cleared to sleep in my own room.

I head for Habitation Ring 1. It’s different again. Not completely so; the previous two crews who stayed here, now deceased, have left their marks. Some paint still clings to the plastic bedroom walls, hinting at the flowers it used to show; the flowers prayed on the ground are better preserved, in more permanent paint. There’s still a dent in one of the walls, where I’d fallen after turning off the ship’s rotation the very first time I was ever in here. Sunset’s favourite ferns thrive in the decorative pots, and by the terminal next to the airlock, the place I once found a cup with “Lea’s happy juice :)” written on it, stands a little doll that Celi made from a stocking.

I go to bed. Even though I just got out of a bed. I’ve dealt with enough today.

I can’t get to sleep. It’s not that I’m not tired. I’ve been awake all day, and I try for hours, until long after I hear other people going to bed, but every time I start to drop off my heart rate picks up and I jerk awake, vividly aware of the last time I fell asleep in this ring, and nearly died. I get up a few times and go to check the air composition at the terminal: normal.

It doesn’t help.

Eventually I give up and head for Greenhouse Ring 1. This involves walking through Recreation and Medical Ring 1, and there are a few tents in there that I didn’t notice coming out of the medbay; I guess I’m not the only person who can’t sleep in HR1. I hesitate, wondering whether I should go join them.

No. Not right now. I head for the greenhouse ring and head for the tall, solid apple tree.

Apple isn’t the best wood for this, but it’s not thorny and I’m not allergic to it, so it’ll do. I harvest what supple new growth I can from the surrounding plants without harming their long-term health and get to work building an Arborean sleeper nest. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve done this; a long time since those childhood days of walking far from home with my cluster to tend remote parts of our territory and stringing up temporary shelters for the night, with Fir holding the ropes in place while Acacia passes up fresh cut branches for me to slot into the structure. But it’s not something you forget how to do.

I don’t even need to do that great a job on this one; there’s no weather to protect from, except a regular and preprogrammed rain cycle. But I do my best, anyway.

And then I lay down among old, familiar scents and textures. And I go to sleep.

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