Fool's War (33 page)

“Thanks,” said Yerusha, a little uncertainly. There was something in his eyes that said he hadn’t quite made up his mind on some particular point. Yerusha pulled her towel away from the velcro strap that held it to the treadmill rail and wiped her face. This was not Schyler on the bridge, with his quick orders and firm responses. This was not Schyler in a meeting, wrangling and arguing and affirming. This was a strange, uncertain Schyler and she wasn’t sure how to deal with him.

“Was there something you wanted, Watch?” she asked finally.
Might as well get straight to it, whatever “it” is.

“Actually,” he looked her in the eye. Something had clicked into place for him and the indecision had vanished. “I wanted to apologize.”

“Apologize?” Yerusha couldn’t stop herself from repeating the word. Her balance which had been shaken, was now in danger of being thrown altogether.

“I was expecting you to use the confusion we had getting away to try to smuggle The Gate’s AI out of there.” He pulled his hands out of his pockets and spread them wide. “I was not expecting you to voluntarily send it back into a fragmented and… virus infested environment. I was getting ready to have to order you to do it. That wasn’t fair, and I’m sorry.”

Yerusha smoothed the towel carefully back down over the velcro. “I was thinking about it. I really was,” she admitted. “It’s been nagging me that I’ve got no idea what I sent her back to. I mean, from what I’ve picked up from listening to Odel in the galley, the live Ai got…killed, but I didn’t know that before. I sent her back into a place where she could have been eaten alive. I was just trying to figure out why.”

“Any conclusions?” Schyler sat on the bench.

Yerusha shrugged and stepped off the treadmill onto the thickly padded floor. “When I did it, I told myself it was because The Gate system could hold a soul and if I put Maidai back she had a chance of catching one for herself. But that wasn’t all of it. I couldn’t leave The Gate to founder and die. It would’ve, you know. They were absolutely dependent on her. That’s fine. That’s good reasoning. We have to help. We have try to break the death cycle the old eco-systems forced on us.” She paused and took a deep breath. “But I also sent her back because I didn’t want you to have to order me to. I didn’t want another blow up with Lipinski. I just wanted to get out of there and get on with things. I didn’t…” she shook her head. “I didn’t want to risk breaking my contract and getting pitched off either there or at The Vicarage. Al Shei was mad enough, I figured she might just do it.”

“Better the devil you know?” asked Schyler softly.

“Better the exile you know, at least.” Yerusha sat on the treadmill and rubbed her hands up and down against her shins. “A lot of this crew don’t like me. All right, that’s nothing new. A lot of groundhogs don’t like Freers and we don’t like them. I don’t like them. I think you’re all nuts to want to spend your lives crawling around on a planet. But you’ve at least been fair. Al Shei’s been fair. You believe I can do my job and you let me go ahead with it. I can’t go home for two years. Crash and burn.” She stared at the tips of her soft-soled boots. “After word about what went across on The Gate gets out, I may not be able to go home at all. I was supposed to keep my record clean.” That was it, and she knew it. That was why she’d really been on the treadmill. She’d been running to get away from that thought. “If that’s the way it is, I’d rather be with people who’ll at least not shove my skills out the airlock because being a Freer makes me worthless.”

The look Schyler gave her was thoughtful. His brown eyes seemed to deepen. “You live the life, don’t you?”

Yerusha’s hands gripped her shins. “I try to,” she answered softly. “I believe it. We’re free out here in the environments that we build and we maintain. We pay a heavy price when we’re confined to a planet. We’ve got to watch every move we make and worry about all the other life that we might upset by blundering around down there. We have to die to make way for other life. We pay for the freedom of space too; we have to help each other out no matter what. We have to take charge of what we do and never stop learning. We have to constantly build on our achievements because if we slow down, our worlds, our freedom will fall apart. But we can get reckless and we can get stupid and we can do dangerous things and not have to worry about anything but ourselves, and we can live as long as we can manage it.”

Schyler nodded. The lines in his square face had deepened into grooves and Yerusha found herself wondering what had put them all there. The backs of his hands and the stance of his body belonged to a much younger man than that face did.

“Well, I’ve got a friend on the justice council at Free Home Titania.” He clapped both hands on his knees and stood up. “If you want me to, I’ll submit a detailed report of the whole thing. The word of a starbird’s got to count for more than the word of a burn-brained groundhugger.” He gave her a ghost of a smile and turned away.

Yerusha stared after him. “Hey, Watch?”

He turned his head so she could see a one-quarter profile of him. His eyebrow arched.

“How’d you get out here?” She couldn’t believe she was asking. This was rude. This was extremely rude. Your fellow crewmember’s past was their own. Your only concern should be their present. But she found that she wanted to know the answer more than she wanted to be polite.

He sighed deeply and turned all the way around. “You ever hear of the Liberty colonies?”

Yerusha pulled back a little. “Yeah, I’ve heard of them.”

Schyler’s smile was tight. His hands had thrust themselves back into his pockets. “They’re as bad as you’ve heard.”

Liberty colonies were based on an old philosophy that said large, centralized governments, controls on trade, and questioning what a person did do within the bounds of their personal property were all detrimental to humanity’s freedom. A full dozen colonies had been settled with that philosophy of “true” liberty.

Yerusha’s first outside contract had been under a pilot who’d hauled freight out of a Liberty colony. He never said what kind of freight, but he had plenty to say about the colony.

“Picture a whole world made up of tiny armies,” he’d said. “Blood feuds over who did what to who’s grandmother, or who’s ancestor might’ve been a Khurd or a Muslim, or who shuffled who out of the last contract. Nobody’s stopped from doing whatever they want, until their neighbors gang up on them and put an end to it permanently. Those neighbors have to make sure they’ve got to take out the whole family in the bargain though, or they’ve just started another feud. People can trade in anything they want, sure, and some of them are rich as all the heavens, and they aren’t constrained by most of the social niceties that the rest of us have to deal with, but free?” He’d just shuddered and shook his head.

Schyler met her eyes. “My folks died when I was three. I never knew why. When I was twenty, I watched three brothers and two sisters die from taking bio-exotics from one port to another. Hal and Andie went to hijackers. Mark and Shelly decided to lift some of the cargo for themselves and it got into their bloodstreams, which was when we found out we were weapons running. Ray got it when the family went after the guys who had us hauling weapons without telling us.” He wasn’t even blinking. Yerusha did not want to have to guess how tightly he was reigning his emotions in. “I wasn’t very good at killing, or at covering my own back. I knew if I stayed there I’d be dead before I hit twenty-five.” He shrugged. “So, I left.”

Yerusha opened her mouth to say, “And nobody tried to stop you?” But she remembered the place they were talking about and stopped herself.

“A freighter’s engineer took pity on me and then a tanker pilot did the same. They got me as far as Kilimanjaro Station. I was so lost.” He gave a small laugh. “I wasn’t even sure how to take a friendly suggestion, never mind how to follow a regulation. I didn’t even know how to buy something that had a fixed price.” His right had came out his pocket and he jerked his thumb towards the hatch. “Al Shei was apprenticing on the station. She found me trying to argue price with an auto-server.” His smile spread, becoming reminiscent. “She helped me out, gave me etiquette lessons, got me a job, after she convinced me that she didn’t have fangs under her hijab, that is.” Yerusha raised her eyebrows. Schyler mimicked the gesture. “All Muslims have fangs and are crazy terrorists, didn’t you know that? That’s one of the reasons the Liberty colonies have to exist, to keep Us Good Folks safe from Them.”

Yerusha chuckled. “I heard the exact same thing from an African Purist once.”

“I heard it from an Aryan.” His hand delved back into his pocket. “Anyway, when Al Shei offered me watch on board the
Pasadena
, I didn’t even think about saying no. I never got really good at…large groups. Too many rules, shifting all the time. A crew of sixteen and a place I knew like the back of my hand was just about what I could handle. As long as I’m here, I know who I am, who she is, and…” he paused. “Well, now I know who you are.” Schyler cycled the hatch open and left her sitting there.

Now that there was no one left to see, Yerusha wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees.
You may know who I am, Watch,
she thought.
But I’m not so sure some days.

She had thought he was going to ask about her exile. It would have been natural. After all, he had just offered up his life’s story. Even while he was talking, Yerusha had found herself replaying that whole fractured day in her head.

Maybe he didn’t ask because he was from a Liberty colony. That was something else her freighter-boss had said; “You’re free to do anything you want, except ask another idiot what they’re doing.”

“Just as well,” she whispered to the empty room. “I didn’t want to tell him.”

She most definitely did not want to tell him how Kim and Thatcher had come to the duty station she shared with Holden and told her there was a conspiracy meeting going down with a group that wanted to create trouble for Port Oberon. She did not want to say how she’d heard these two were organizers for the quiet dole but had refused to believe it because they were candidates for the Senior Guard, just like she was. She had seen the fear in Holden’s eyes and had heard the tension in his voice as he all but begged her to stay at her post. She decided to ignore all that. She let Thatcher cover for her, and let Kim take her down to what proved to be an empty cargo hold and explain quietly that there were only so many openings for Senior, and it was position with so many possibilities for someone who knew how to really use it, that it couldn’t go to somebody like Yerusha. Not that this was just about her, of course. Holden had refused several very polite offers for promotion in the ranks of those who ran the dole, and they couldn’t have that either.

There was, of course, no reason for Yerusha to remain in such an uncomfortable position. There was plenty she could do to get out of it. She had a lot of ingenuity, and great prospects. All she had to do was accept a little extra credit on the side, for a few simple tasks.

Yerusha landed a punch on his throat, and ran back to her post. The alarms were blaring. Holden was screaming, and the pressure hatch swung shut. The airlock blew out and they never found the body.

Yerusha tried to tell them at trial. But, the cameras had been damaged in the blow out, and it was Kim and Thatcher’s words against her, and they had back-up alibis and she didn’t. She had deserted her post knowingly. She had failed to report in to her superiors. She had failed to assist in efforts to squash the quiet dole. A Freer had died because of her negligence. This was true. This was fact. Holden was dead when he didn’t have to be and it was her fault. She was phenomenally lucky the judges thought something unproven was going on, or her exile would have been permanent.

No, I don’t want to tell Schyler about all that. Nobody needs to know about that.

Yerusha picked herself up off the treadmill and pulled the towel away from the velcro. She could hear the faint buzz of Javerri’s mystery still playing itself out in the booth. She’d never had much use for interactives, but Javerri seemed to like them a lot. Maybe she could recommend a good one. Maybe it would help fill some of the extra hours.

“Intercom to Pilot!”

Yerusha started. The voice belonged to Phillipe Delasandros, Cheney’s relief.

“Pilot here, Del, what’s going on?”

There was a brief pause. “The proximity alarm, actually.”

It’s too soon. Too soon!
Yerusha dropped the towel and bolted for the hatch. “I’m there!”

She barrelled out into the corridor, almost straight through Baldassare Sundar. She took the stairs two at a time and dove through the bridge hatch as soon as it opened wide enough for her body. The alarm filled the bridge with its steady, unmistakable wail.

Delasandros, heavily built and heavily freckled, jumped out of the Station One chair a split second before she threw herself into it.

She threw herself into her chair. “Strap in!” she bellowed to Del, who seem to have frozen in place.

The proximity alarm rang for only two reasons. The first was when the ship was in normal space and getting too close to something that might do it some damage, like another ship. The second was when it was close enough to a gravity well that it had to make the jump back into normal space, and nobody had done any of the manual preparations.

Which nobody had, because this wasn’t supposed to be happening for another four hours.