Born from Fire: Tales from The Longview - Episode 1 Page 4

  Kagen heard the screams of the burning behind him. Before him, though, lay the clean, silent deeps of space. The possibility of his own ship within reach in twelve years, if he could make the grade, get the promotions, and keep his crew record clean.

  Freedom, space, a way to get away from the regulated worlds and move out from under the ever-watching eye of the Pact, and away from slaver worlds, and maybe set up on an indie world as a transport. Or a privateer.

  The Dream, and everything it took him away from, was sliding into reach.

  Kagen

  “THIS IS YOUR QUARTERS,” Melie told him. “As the Crew Green, you get 3-B. You’ve been Crew Green before.”

  Kagen nodded. “For two months. But I remember the drill. First out of bed, scrub the head before anyone else is awake, respond to all alarms, make sure the crew unit is secure; if there’s an emergency, make sure everyone in the unit is in shipsuits. I am Green, I am expendable.”

  Melie said, “You and me both. When you’re crew, you never get to forget what it means to be Green.”

  “You’re doing Green duty in Crew One?”

  “That’s not the half of it. You’re probably going to be Green for six months, until one of your current Blues decides not to stick it out for the next promotion. At which point you’ll bump up and the new Three Gold will jump at the chance to be Two Green. But me? I’m looking at up to three years as One Green, because Joze is only two years in as Two Gold. And there are only two of us. With three years left on his eligibility, he’s not going to leave until he makes first mate or runs out his clock. And I don’t move up until he makes officer or leaves.”

  “And we have a brand new first mate who has five years to promote to captain, and a relatively new captain.”

  Melie nodded.

  “But you’re Crew One.”

  She grinned. “That I am. And you know I’m sticking. I want to make captain here. But either way, I’ll qualify as captain and do the licensing, and if I run out my clock, I’ll buy my own ship. And I could be the one who’s in the right place at the right time to be captain here.”

  “So you did the full Crew Two run,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Any advice?”

  “Probably not any that you need. Most of the crew in Two is not pushing for captain. Most of them haven’t done the investments. They love spending time in rec, and spending their downtime on the fun worlds having fun. So you study like a beast for the exams, and you take them every single time you’re eligible. Aim to step-promote every year—if you go faster, you won’t have as much money saved up. Do all the owner-recommended investments, live cheap, and at bare minimum you’ll get out of here with enough money to make a good down payment on your ship. What you do from there is up to you.”

  “And best case...”

  “Best case, you become my first mate, and when I move on to my own ship, you become Longview’s captain.”

  Other members of Crew Two started coming in. They would wash before their meal, then go up to the Mess Hall to eat together.

  Kagen knew the people in Two, but only as an underling. As Green, he was still an underling, but now he was their underling.

  Mash was the new Two Gold, Taryn was the new Two Silver, and Lindar, Porth, and Aya were all Blues. Each of them touched fingertips with him as they came in, and each said, “Welcome to Two, greenie.” Each then touched fingertips with Melie and said, “Do well in One.”

  It was the way all crew got welcomed into a new unit, and the way all promoted crew left. It always seemed casual, but it wasn’t. The words were precisely the same, and they hid the motivations, prejudices, and passions of those who said them.

  Incoming crew frequently knew—or at least knew about—their seniors. Existing unit crew knew about the reputations of incoming juniors. But living with them in the close quarters of the unit, eating with them at every meal of every day, spending recreational or study time with them, they would be forced into a closeness that Kagen found difficult to manage.

  He had dealt with the issue by burying himself in study, working for promotion points, and taking every grade exam the instant he became eligible. It let him avoid people as much as possible, and the distance he kept had made it easier for him to keep the distance necessary to be effective in Gold. He’d never had friends he had to discipline, because he didn’t have friends. No one ever accused him of favoritism, because he didn’t have favorites.

  He hoped that same would work to his advantage in Two.

  Mash, as the new Gold, said, “Present your connector.”

  Kagen reached out with his right hand. The pale circle of luminescent ink—something exclusively used by the crew of the Longview—marked the location of embedded data-transfer nanoclusters that allowed the instant exchange of information.

  “Your Level Two Green Packet and Orders,” Mash said, and the two clasped right hands. Their connectors linked up, and Kagen instantly had full access to his orders, his room assignment, the crew-level promotion sheets of the people in his unit, and his schedule.

  “I’m missing my list of recommended investments,” he said.

  Mash’s face darkened, and his gaze flicked from Melie back to Kagen. “You’ll get them when you need them, greenie.”

  Mash, he realized, was a man who needed to be the biggest bull in the room.

  Kagen didn’t miss the expressions on either Melie’s or Mash’s face as they stared each other down.

  “So. You’re sticking me with your... protégé?” Mash asked, and his emphasis on the word suggested a relationship considerably less professional than mentor and student.

  Melie stared right back. “Are you already failing at your job requirements as Two Gold?”

  She outranked him. She clearly didn’t like him. He clearly didn’t like her—this was information that had never filtered down to Crew Three.

  If Melie had time to force the issue with Mash, his dislike for her would get itself transferred to Kagen with the same speed that his Green packet had arrived.

  And Melie wasn’t going to be around to help him deal with Mash. She was going to be in her own unit, busy dealing with her own stint as Green.

  The Dream flickered before his eyes. Mash could ruin him—Kagen had never sabotaged anyone in Three, because he didn’t like or dislike his underlings. But he knew how sabotage could be accomplished easily within any portion of the three years Mash could remain as Crew Two Gold.

  Kagen had to side with his crew leader, no matter how much he didn’t want to.

  “Not a problem,” he told Mash. “I wasn’t planning on wasting my money gambling on something speculative anyway. I just wanted to see what was on the sheet.”

  He saw the look of shock on Melie’s face, the look of satisfaction on Mash’s.

  And in the moment he said it, he realized that he had no other way to get the recommended investments if Mash didn’t pass them to him. Packets were coded. No crew member could share his or accidentally pass it to someone else.

  Mash would hold Kagen to his word... he’d said that he wasn’t interested. Mash—biggest bull in the room—would remind Kagen of his words if ever he tried to recant. So Kagen would lose up to three prime years of building his capital to buy his ship that he could not get back, and the early years were the most important. Compound interest made early investments vastly more profitable than investments made late.

  And just as bad, if the look on Melie’s face was any indication, he had just murdered all hope of her recommending him again as the two of them moved up the promotion ladder. He’d just spit on her for championing him in front of a man who was not just her subordinate, but her enemy.

  Third, he’d put himself on the wrong side of the career fence, marked himself to those others in his unit who were on the promotion track as light crew who didn’t understand the value of this ship, this job, this opportunity.

  Worst of all, he knew why he’d done it. The pathetic voice of We that still wailed inside of him, that still bent before trouble rather than standing against it, had cried out that he was about to be destroyed.

  And he had listened.

  He’d betrayed his ally, had sided with his enemy, had claimed We over I.

  He would have done anything to have that moment back. But the moment was gone, the damage done.

  He’d made an unrecoverable mistake.

  A man who could not hold onto his principles against the threat of disapproval was not a man who would ever be captain. Not of this ship.

  Not of any ship.

  CHAPTER 5

  Kagen

  ALONE, KAGEN WORKED his way through the stacks on Level Ten. The place made his skin crawl. It wasn’t as bad when Melie had done the first two rounds with him, though those rounds hadn’t been pleasant.

  She’d spoken to him only when she absolutely had to as she showed him the process of keeping each Condemned core connected into the system and fully charged.

  She made sure he understood that any disconnect or unit failure would mean his job—that every active core unit was valuable to the owner and the crew responsible for the few units that had ever failed had been dropped off at the Needle of whatever world was next on the circuit and left to fend for themselves.

  Core integrity was the number one priority of every member of Two. Everything else came second.

  But while she did her job well, that was all she did. She didn’t hear him if he offered a personal remark or tried to apologize. She gave him the two days of training he needed, and then she was gone to her own duties as Crew Two Green.

  And he was left with Mash, who went through after he had made his rounds and claimed to have found errors Kagen had made, even though Kagen knew he had not made them. Three weeks into hi
s stint as Two Green, Mash still treated him like a complete waste of skin.

  Kagen worked his way alone through the dimly lit stacks, feeling the ghosts of his past and the ghosts of his future crowding in on him, and he tried to focus on the work he was doing.

  The still bodies in the stacks made it hard for him to maintain his romantic notion of the owner as some escaped Class B prisoner made good and determined to save his fellow Class B prisoners. The endless rows of the officially dead stored in cold, hard storage units spoke of some horrific purpose that he could not begin to comprehend. He did his best not to look at their faces through the transparent inspection covers. The people inside did not breathe. They did not move.

  They were not dead, but they were the same as dead. They had been reported dead back on their home worlds, with the terms of their executions fulfilled.

  Officially dead, but not entirely dead—stored, with large amounts of energy expended in storing them.

  All of the cores—the storage units with their locking seals stamped Death Sentence Carried Out and their heavy-duty power cables and complex end-caps that performed functions no one could guess at—were full in Level Ten. All of them were red-lighted. All of them would always be red-lighted. Level Ten was designated permanent storage.

  Each person in each core had been passed over for purchase, had been categorized as unsaleable, and had been sentenced to eternity within the chamber that held him. Or her.

  Men and women, young and old, lay motionless, eyes closed, lungs forever stilled, captive forever, with enormous amounts of power running through their units, not alive but not dead either.

  Kagen’s imagination ran wild. To store the not-entirely-dead in such a fashion, the owner had to be doing something with them. Had he discovered a way to use them as filters to process vast quantities of designer nanoviruses? Had he discovered that souls were real, and found a way to sell theirs? No one would spend the vast fortune it had taken to store the bodies of countless nearly dead for as close to eternity as technology could reach unless there was some tremendous payoff for him. It was entirely too cheap and easy to simply kill people and dump their bodies into space.

  So why did this place with its red lights exist?

  He rounded the corner in the narrow aisle, asking himself that question, and this one time, his head was up and he was looking directly at the ident screen on the core directly in front of him as he came around the corner.

  It said We-T74G.

  He froze.

  He stared at the screen, frowning, trying to look at the letters and numbers and see a different combination, to make it clear to himself that his mind was playing tricks on him.

  But below the identity designator, he read, “Origin: The People’s Home of Truth and Fairness 14-B.”

  The date was right around the time he’d been exiled to the Needle, sentenced to work alone until he was ready to starve to death or throw himself into space to rejoin the We. She might have come aboard in a transport unit the same day he’d been taken in as a passenger by the Longview. He had worked his way past her and checked her unit half a dozen times without seeing her.

  But this time, he found himself frozen, staring at a face he could not believe he was seeing. She was the girl of his memory—unchanged—though he could no longer see the little grin she’d aimed at him when the two of them were doing Weeding Duty, separated by the wire mesh that kept We First apart from We Second.

  Her dark hair curled up around her face as if gravity meant nothing to it, as it had always done.

  Her lips were full and perfect. Her brow arched. Her jaw was smooth and firm. She would never have been sentenced with the crime of Property of Beauty.

  She was the girl he’d kissed and called “Love” during the morning recitation of the Truth of We.

  She’d been Condemned when he’d been exiled.

  He had never before considered that she might be sentenced to death for what he had done. But she would have been. There was no justice on a People’s Home of Truth and Fairness.

  Her crime would have been Property of Love. He looked lower on the ident screen.

  “Murder Grand, four counts.”

  That was impossible. They’d lied about her to make an example of her. To make sure she would never kiss another boy—and to make sure, as well, that anyone who saw what happened to her wouldn’t either.

  So they’d sentenced her for murder, which meant she could not be offered Return to Citizenship in the lake of fire.

  Then they’d sent her away so some rich ship owner could flip a switch and turn her off forever.

  On another world, the two of them could have been together. On some sane Pact world, they could have been friends. Could have been lovers. Could have been together their whole lives.

  He rested his fingertips on her core. He whispered, “If you had known it would end like this, would you still have done it? Would you still have kissed me back? Locked away in a storage unit in the bottom of a spaceship for the rest of forever, never knowing what you were being used for, what precious commodity was being drained from your body and sold...”

  Her still, frozen face haunted him. “No,” she seemed to say. “Of course I wouldn’t have kissed you. Look what they did to me because I did.”

  He looked at the future that lay before him. He had sold his future among the stars because he’d been unwilling to stand firm against Mash—just as he had sold the girl whose smile he had loved to Death for the price of a kiss.

  He had failed, and failed again. His dreams were dead. His future was ruined

  Only one path remained to him.

  Melie

  WHEN THE EMERGENCY panel went off on Level Ten, Melie was asleep.

  But she was Green, so she dragged herself upright, threw on her shipsuit, and gravdropped to Ten with the suit accelerating her passage.

  The units on Ten were usually stable. She’d seen Mash’s reports about Two Green making mistakes, but as Level One crew, she had access to the process flows from Level Ten, and Kagen hadn’t made any mistakes.

  Someone had come along after him, had tampered with what he’d done, had played with the public time-set to make it look like the mistake had been made when the unit was checked, and had then signed himself into the unit as himself and had corrected the error and sent notification to the captain.