Furnace

FURNACE

Joseph Williams

Copyright 2016 by Joseph Williams

For Cathy

With special thanks to Mark Gottlieb

ROYAL SPACE ARMADA

DEPARTMENT OF INTERNAL AFFAIRS

REQUISITION FOR CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS

(1) WRITTEN TESTIMONY OF RSA
FIRST LIEUTENANT
CHALMERS, MICHAEL A.
REGARDING EVENTS OF
MISSION ****19JCE
(CLASSIFIED)

SUBPOENAED AS
EXHIBIT C
IN THE TRIAL OF THE STATE VS. RSA
CAPTAIN
GIBBONS, BARTHOLOMEW H.

FILED BY REPRESENTATIVE
GALLAGHER, ELIZABETH A.

***
PLEASE NOTE
***DISCLOSING CLASSIFIED R.S.A. DATA OUTSIDE OFFICIAL D.O.I.A. PROCEEDINGS IS PUNISHABLE BY EXILE WITHOUT APPEAL. SHOULD THE COURT FIND THE CLASSIFIED DATA SIGNIFICANTLY DETRIMENTAL TO THE R.S.A. AND THE DISCLOSURE ESPECIALLY EGREGIOUS AND/OR MALICIOUS, A TRIAL WILL BE HELD IMMEDIATELY TO DETERMINE WHETHER THE DEATH PENALTY IS WARRANTED.***
HANDLE WITH CARE TO AVOID SWIFT LEGAL RETRIBUTION***
 

PRELIMINARIES

I screwed up. That’s the only reasonable explanation I arrive at each time I consider the Furnace incident.

No one else seems to see it that way though, no matter how deeply they wade in the muck and mire of data logs and survivor testimonies. The Crown performed an inquest when we returned to Earth. The chief investigator assigned to the case claimed there wasn’t a man or woman alive—excluding, maybe, the friends and relatives of the deceased—who would blame me for what happened to our ship in deep space. Beyond it, really. That’s the worst part. We had no idea where the hell we were, and it was my
job
to know. Space is an infinite cesspool of misery with fresh horrors on every goddamned rock you land on, but the Furnace incident was different than any so-called ‘normal’ complication on a hostile planet. A lot different. It’s not a mission you’d boast about to other soldiers when you drop by Pluto or Mars Station. You wouldn’t bother telling your next C.O. how you survived a combat zone unlike anything the fleet has ever seen, or how you climbed a little higher in the pecking order because of it. It’s not worth it. You’d never do it justice.

Furnace was hell. No other word sufficiently describes it. Surviving that horror-show is nothing to brag about. It just means you’re a little weaker between the ears than the rest of your fleet brethren, and that maybe one day you’ll descend into utter lunacy while they’re enjoying fat pension checks on a luxury planet somewhere far away from the war front.

For all his maddening nonchalance, the chief investigator meant well. He pointed out the same tired arguments I hear all the time from people desperately trying to vindicate me. He must have thought it would stick better the more he beat it into my head.

“The ship’s navigation controls malfunctioned,” he reminded me with a shooing gesture during my report. The litany began shortly thereafter: Most of the crew had suffered complete mental breakdowns, including my commanding officer. All the coordinates I’d laid in were technically correct, and while certain aspects of my conduct were unbecoming of a fleet navigator, they were necessary in the face of such ruthless depravity. Eventually, probably after months of fleet-appointed therapy on the taxpayer dime, I’ll realize that I’m no more culpable for the deaths of my crewmates than the Crown is for sending us out to sea in the first place.

“You’ll get over it,” he added while ushering me from his office, as though that were the final word on the matter. “Just take it one day at a time.”

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? A convenient way to disarm guilt and blame in one fell swoop. Fallacious, tautological arguments which elevate the fleet—and me, by proxy—above accountability. Above paying the piper.

None of that’s comforting when I’m lying awake at three in the morning though, staring out at the night sky so intently that you might think I’m looking for bits of blood and bone from my fallen comrades floating in the moon-rays. None of it seems true.

Night is always the worst because that’s when I
know
I messed up. When the sky is nearly pitch-black like it was on Furnace and I see devils in the shadows and hear the clown king’s bony knuckles rapping at my door. When I start obsessively running through my check-downs and coordinate logs searching for the hidden error that set everything in motion. The one that got almost everyone killed. I figure there’s got to be an answer layered somewhere beneath thousands of encryptions, network codes, and technical jargon, right? I’m sure I’ll find it eventually.

But maybe that’s just guilt talking. Maybe I’m just seeking absolution for my sins on Furnace (the name we gave that shithole planet past the edge of everything) so I can get some kind of closure. The chief investigator and my therapist seem to think so. In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter what
they
think. Or the Crown or the fleet or anyone else because
I
know I screwed up.

It’s all my fault.

And it all started with a stop on Europa Station, where I let my guard down because of a girl I used to love.

But I guess I should introduce myself now, so long as I’m about to tell you the worst thing that ever happened to me. This is supposed to be therapeutic, but I’ve got a feeling it will be the opposite when all is said and done. For both of us.

I’m First Lieutenant Michael Chalmers, Fleet Navigator in the Royal Space Armada. Everyone just calls it the fleet though. Lowercase and all. We jump around the galaxy transporting goods, protecting colonists, and picking fights, although the Crown would have you believe the latter is a lie. I don’t officially have an opinion on it one way or another because I value my commission, but I will say that most of our ‘misunderstandings’ with other species have little to do with them invading
our
territory. Only the Kalak and Tsoul have been bold enough to enter our solar system with blasters blazing, and we all know what happened to them.

I put in two years with the infantry before they tagged me for navigation. I’d been looking to transfer since the girl from Europa—also a navigator—told me it was the thing to do. Every word she spoke back then was gospel to me, so I’d promptly volunteered to shadow some test missions on the side to learn the trade. After that, I fell deeply enough in love with either the girl or the work to never look back.

I saw some crazy shit during my two years in the infantry and even more between receiving my commission as a navigator and our surprise visit to Furnace, but those stories will have to wait for another time. If I don’t tell this story now, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get everything right. Time will strip important details from my memory. I may block it all out eventually for the sake of my mental wellbeing, or maybe the Crown will do it for me.

So let me tell you about the most fucked-up mission anyone in the human fleet has ever run. That’s why you’re reading this, right?

I guess it all started on Europa Station.

EUROPA: AN INTRODUCTION TO FLEET LIFE

Believe it or not, the question I get most from civilian friends and relatives about being in the fleet is what life is like on the stations between Earth and the Oort Cloud. They don’t want to know what’s running through your head when you’re attacked by an alien three feet taller than the average human and about four-hundred pounds heavier. They don’t care what a Kyzhaman orange tastes like or what physiological changes occur after hearing a Fronov female sing. They want someone to tell them what life is like for troops within our own borders. How the other half lives. I guess I understand it, in a sense. Sometimes, people aren’t comfortable asking about the most traumatic events in your life. Like being shot three times through the ribs and watching your best friend bleed to death while field surgeons extract bullets from your back and sew you up to keep fighting. I get it, and I’m always happy to give some insight into how we ship-rats view the local facilities.

The first thing I usually tell them is that every soldier’s favorite place to visit is Europa, and every soldier’s
least
favorite assignment is Pluto.

Europa Station is more or less the last stop in the solar system where there’s any fun to have for a guy like me before a fleet ship enters the non-human portion of the galaxy (which, as you know, is pretty much all of it). There are other stations between Europa and Pluto running through the Kuiper Belt —dozens of them, actually—but those are all doom and gloom. Usually, we only stop at one if we need an emergency refuel or have a problem with the ship’s systems.

It’s not just the scenery that makes Pluto a downer. The soldiers and scientists stationed in those labs are morose and irritable. I guess wasting the prime years of their military careers isolated on balls of ice and rock has broken their spirits. As you can imagine, they’re a real joy to be around in that state, but it’s hard to blame them. They may have signed up for the fleet but almost none of them wanted babysitting duty. There’s no adventure in it. No exploration, no furlough, no alcohol beyond what the supply ships smuggle in every few months. There’s not even much in the way of rec activities to shake their cabin fever outside of SurReal World, and sometimes I wonder if the virtual reality does more harm for them than good. Maybe they just don’t have enough imagination to believe what they’re seeing under the holo-glasses is real, even for a little while.

Did I mention most of them are a little insane? It’s not surprising when you consider the lives they lead on desolate planetoids millions of miles from their loved ones. Hell,
anyone
who leaves Mother Earth for an extended period of time usually gets a little case of what they call the ‘Parin Blues’.

No matter how commonplace the reaction may be, though, it’s still demoralizing to see people in such perpetual states of hopelessness, especially when they
aren’t leaving the solar system to risk their lives in the trenches like we are. Probably they envy us for it, but that’s bullshit to me. They’ve got it easy. Some days, I think I’d resign my post in a heartbeat to share in their boredom and never again worry about being enslaved, tortured, dissected, or worse on an alien planet. I’d be giving up some action, sure, but to hell with it, right? I’ve barely been in the fleet three years and I’ve already seen enough of the killing floor to last me a dozen lifetimes.

Still, the grass isn’t always greener. I guess it’s good for me to think about the sad saps on Pluto from time to time. Their palpable frustration reminds me why I chose the risks of deep-space missions over a comfortable desk job in the first place. My willingness to apply to one of those posts is generally a good barometer of my disillusionment with the fleet on a given day, but I always arrive at the same decision: I’d rather die in the trenches than lose my soul in the Pluto labs.

Europa Station, on the other hand, is a much different experience, and that’s why I haven’t ruled it out completely for my next assignment. Europa’s got plenty of alcohol, gambling, state-of-the-art holo-training sims, and a feed with Earth programming so you can watch a ball game or catch up on your favorite shows while you’re off-duty. Our onboard SurReal World holo-glasses have a lot of the TV stuff, too, but usually just from the weeks before we left. They haven’t figured out a cost-effective method for updating the content real-time and it’s (understandably) a low priority while we’re still colonizing the galaxy and trying to avoid a second war with the Kalak lizards.

Europa is still a cold, desolate place though, and as the Crown’s main arms manufacturing site outside the Detroit factories, it’s still a government station first and foremost. The truth is, no matter what I spout to inquiring civilians, I’m not sure
how
Europa became a destination for shore leave. The surface is every bit as miserable as any other moon station or planetoid (excluding the colonies). Maybe the first Europa crew was fun-loving enough to get the ball rolling and the reputation eventually became self-fulfilling. Who knows?

Anyway, when we arrived on Europa Station three days after we broke the Moon’s orbit and about a week before the shit hit the fan, the crew of our ship the
RSA Rockne Hummel
was in high spirits. And why not? We had two days to ourselves (more or less) before we set off on a supposedly routine escort mission, and there were three other ships docked on Europa along with us, which was excellent news. The more ships on Europa, you see, the more soldiers wandering around looking for a good time.

I’d barely breathed a word to the rest of the crew, so I was looking forward to getting to know them all a little better. Six months (our estimated mission duration) can feel like sixty if you don’t get along with your crewmates, even if you’re in stasis for a good portion of it. There was a bigger reason I was excited to arrive on Europa though, and she wound up playing a considerable role in my Furnace nightmare. She’s also the reason Europa has always been on my short-list of desired assignments. We have history, after all.

I was raised in the suburbs twenty miles from Detroit. I went to a good school. I got good grades. The general consensus among my peers and elders coming out of high school was that I had a bright future ahead of me, which of course meant I was destined to enlist. The economic climate five years ago was pretty much the same as it is today (big shocker), and the most stable, lucrative career for any kid right out of high school is still the fleet so long as you survive long enough to reap the benefits. With humanity’s reach ever-expanding across the galaxy through mining operations, incentivized colonization, galactic trade, and scientific research, there’s no shortage of open positions whether you prefer a combat role, manual labor, or the real brainy stuff. Most assignments beat a cubicle job by a long shot, and all of them beat working in the factories and warehouses in Detroit. College would have been even worse. I saw no point to going seven-figures in debt for a check-mark on my public record and no real employment prospects, especially when I could be four to five years deep in a successful military career by the time I was out, and with no debt to boot.

So I made the jump.

I bring this up not to romanticize my rapid rise among the fleet ranks but because I knew a girl (I guess she’s a full-blown
woman
now as rightly as I consider myself a man) from my high school days who’d enlisted in the fleet around the same time I did, and she was stationed on Europa at the time of the escort mission. Actually, I more than
knew
her. We were an item for a couple years as teenagers and sent letters back and forth while we were both enrolled at the academy. It gave us something to look forward to. A distraction from the physical and psychological torture that is astronaut training. At some point I started feeling the old way about her again, even though we’d ended things shortly after graduation. In other words, I had more than drinking on my mind when we docked.

For reasons I don’t want to get into, I’d like to omit her name and rank from this report, or whatever they decide to call this. I’ve already provided the chief investigator with her identity in case she’s needed for questioning, but for the purposes of this account, her name is irrelevant.

I also want to clarify right now that I don’t blame her in any way for what happened on Furnace or prior to it. She made a suggestion as a fellow fleet navigator based on her own experiences and theories, and I easily could have decided not to listen. The calculations still seem spot-on each time I run through them, and the chief investigator’s team has independently verified their accuracy. It’s not her
formula
that’s wrong, either. Greater minds than I have tested it at Sol Facility for years. Yet that’s the only deviation we made from our assigned flight path between leaving Europa and arriving in Furnace’s orbit, so it’s hard not to be suspicious of the so-called ‘shortcut’ even while acknowledging she’s not to blame. After all, at least a thousand ships have made that exact same run between Europa and our extraction point, and not one of them has encountered our problem as far as I know. Maybe they just didn’t make it back to tell the tale.

After we landed, I followed the holo-map to my assigned quarters and threw my duffel on the bed, turning back toward the corridor without bothering to flip on the light and scope my accommodations. I was barely aware of my surroundings, in fact, which isn’t like me at all. I like to think of myself as a fairly easygoing individual (at least, as easygoing as a navigator can be; our kind tends to freak out when life doesn’t go exactly as we plan), but failing to unpack my belongings in favor of immediate debauchery was a little much even for me. I was about to sleep for a month, though. I didn’t plan on spending much time in my quarters. And as long as I didn’t get so bent out of shape in forty-eight hours that I couldn’t program a course for Marvek (the human colony where we were scheduled to pick up an ambassador so he wouldn’t fall victim to disgruntled colonists and then purchase some rare mineral from a shady Fronov dealer), I figured I would be all right.

Before I reached Europa Center and The Captain’s Quarters though, one of my crewmates intercepted me. The pilot, I quickly realized. Tymoteusz Wolski. We called him Teemo.

“Chalmers,” he grinned, making his tight, brown stubble stretch across his narrow cheeks. He slapped me on the back and turned me in the opposite direction.

“Teemo,” I answered.

I did my best to sound carefree and happy to see him, but thinking back, I probably did a shit job of it. As much as I wanted to get to know the man better, especially given that pilots and navigators are supposed to be like the rhythm section of a spaceship, I was in a hurry. It had been a long, long time since I’d held a woman, and the fleet wasn’t exactly the best place to strike up meaningful relationships. In time, I knew I might get friendly with some of my shipmates. Myself included, there were seventy-four souls on the
RSA Rockne Hummel
, and thirty-three of those seventy-four were female. I hadn’t gotten to know any of them well enough to calculate whether or not there was intimacy potential beyond a work relationship, but I was hopeful. It was going to be a relatively long mission for a mid-sized vessel, after all, and we would be working in tight quarters during our duty shifts outside of hyper-sleep.

The woman waiting for me in The Captain’s Quarters, however, was familiar territory. I didn’t want to blow it.

“Where you headed?” Teemo asked.

I knew him well enough to see there was mischief in his eyes, but not well enough to realize I should have run screaming the moment the smirk rose to his lips. Luckily, I didn’t learn my lesson from him that night. Or maybe
un
luckily, I guess. Maybe if he’d dragged me off somewhere to get shitfaced and I hadn’t met up with my old flame at all, we never would have wound up on Furnace. Or maybe fate would have brought us there anyway.

“The Captain’s Quarters.”

He scoffed. “The CQ? That place is shit!” He waved both hands and shook his head emphatically to be sure his point was well-received. One thing I learned quickly about Teemo was that he was a consummate showman. Nothing was ever simple or boring for him, if only because he was determined to act as though it wasn’t. “No,” he continued, giving my shoulder a sharp tug. “You’re coming with me.”

I forced a grin and tried to slip his grip. “Is that so?”

He nodded. “It must be.”

That was the other thing about Teemo. No one expected him to speak English (the
lingua franca
has been Galactic Standard since First Contact) and he wasn’t great at it, but he tried anyway whenever he was off-duty around Americans like myself. I can’t say why. I certainly never learned Polish.

Planting my feet, I finally wiggled free and started off in the opposite direction. “I’d love to, Teems, but I’ve got plans.”

“Plans?” he frowned. “What kind of plans? Am I invited?”

I laughed, and this time the good humor was genuine. I could feel that I was in the clear, and memories of the girl waiting for me—the one I’d been daydreaming about ever since learning our mission included a stop at Europa—were suddenly so suffocating that I had trouble holding my legs steady beneath me. “Not this time. Maybe tomorrow.”

Teemo studied me closely for a moment, and then his grin stretched wider than I’d ever thought possible. “It’s a lady, isn’t it? You going to meet a girl?”

I turned away with a smirk and shook my head.