Born from Fire: Tales from The Longview - Episode 1 Read online

  She suspected this time Mash had set one unit low enough to drop to alarm status before Kagen did his next rounds—which would put Kagen before the captain, the first mate, and the owner’s representative, unless the owner himself decided to weigh in.

  She hit Ten fast and followed the overhead running lights and the directional signal on her wristcom through the stacks.

  And there she found Kagen. With him stood a girl who was touching his face with a mixture of joy and dismay—and beside the two of them was the shattered Sentence Seal that had once secured the core unit of We-T74G.

  “I do remember you,” the girl was saying, running her fingers across Kagen’s cheeks and lips and jaw.

  “Oh, hell,” Melie whispered.

  Kagen turned to stare at her. He stepped in front of the girl. “Before you say anything, I’m taking her place in the box. She did nothing to deserve a death sentence, and I’m the reason she was sentenced. If I can’t be the captain of my own ship, if I can’t fix what I’ve done wrong here, I can at least fix what I did to her. Just help me get into the core, lock it back, figure out a way to reseal it...”

  And the girl looked from Kagen to Melie and said, “He didn’t know, and he doesn’t understand. But I have to go back in. As much as I want to be with him, I can’t stay here.”

  Melie said, “Kagen, you idiot. You screwed up everything. You— We... whatever your number is. I’ll help you into the box. Maybe we can still fix all of this.”

  The girl said, “Just call me Lithra.”

  And then, behind Melie, the owner's representative, Shay, said, “Unfortunately, We-T74G’s unit has already reported re-activation."

  Melie cringed and turned to face her.

  Shay continued, "No one can go into that core now. We're going to have to file an incident report with the Death Circus administration about one of our official executions appearing to return to life... and all three of you are going to have to stand before the captain and the first mate. You will probably have to face the owner, too, instead of me. He was furious when the alarm went off in his quarters.”

  The security detail came around the corner, and snapped restraints on Kagen and Melie. Lithra walked between them, unrestrained but cooperative.

  CHAPTER 6

  Kagen

  THE CAPTAIN SAT at the big chair in his private mess. On his right sat the first mate. The chair to his left was empty. When everyone came through the door, he looked past Melie, Lithra, Kagen, and the security detail to the owner’s representative. “He says he’s too angry to deal with them rationally. You’re in the third seat, Shay.”

  Kagen had never seen the owner’s representative before. She was stunning. Long, straight red hair, impossibly green eyes, incredible body. He wondered what her story was—how she'd ended up among the Longview's misfits.

  Shay sighed heavily. “I don’t know why he does this. He’s never happy with what I decide.”

  Then she took her seat and said, “I have the comlink open to the owner’s quarters. He may or may not comment, but he’ll get the full recording. So go ahead when you’re ready.”

  The captain nodded. “He have a preference in which one we interview first?”

  Shay murmured into her shipcom and came back with, “Lithra. He wants to know why the idiot took her out of the box.”

  The captain muttered, “I’d ask the idiot that question,” but Lithra had already stepped forward.

  “When I was We-T74G on The People’s Home of Truth and Fairness 14-B, the man behind me was a boy. And he was my only friend, even though we never dared speak to each other. You know how the PHTF worlds are. And one day he kissed me, and did it in front of Speakers for We. He was exiled to the Needle, where he was to stay until he died, while I was sentenced as a criminal of Property: Love, and handed to the Speakers to be their plaything.

  “I did not want to have them touch me,” she said. “I decided I would rather die—so I attacked the first man who came into the cell where I was held, and was lucky enough to kill him. I took the weapon I found on his body, and used it to kill the next three men who entered the cell. One of the men was the Head Speaker, and the fact that he was dead and that I had killed him made it mandatory that I be sentenced as a Class A prisoner. And because I was a Class A prisoner, I was untouched until I was sent to the Death Circus.

  “If he had not kissed me, I would never have survived to escape PHTF 14-B. Even if the Speakers had not taken me before I became an official citizen to be one of their toys, to be abused and killed as so many other women were, I would have spent the rest of my life in one of the breeding factories. If unending cycles of pregnancy and childbirth didn't kill me, volunteering for the Room of Release or Return to Citizenship when I could no longer bear children would have.

  "I request that you absolve him for the actions he took tonight, even though there will be problems that arise from them. He acted out of love and great courage—he was willing to go into my box and take my death sentence to give me my freedom.”

  “We cannot let him go unpunished. He destroyed the owner’s property, acted against the rules he had agreed to obey, and has put the charter of the Longview at risk,” the captain said. “He cannot remain in his current position as crew.”

  “I agree,” the first mate said.

  The girl looked from captain to first mate, clearly frightened. “I do not understand.”

  The owner’s representative said, “He will be sentenced based on his actions. He must be. Otherwise, there can be no justice.” She gave the girl a long look, and eventually the girl nodded. “You faced the same justice he faces. Think on that. And now it is time for you to return to your core. It’s been repaired.”

  “No!” Kagen shouted. “You can’t condemn her to nothingness again! She did nothing wrong!”

  “We must,” Shay said. “This ship cannot maintain its charter if we do not.”

  Lithra turned to the crew who were on security duty, and said, “I’ll go with you, and I won’t cause you any problems.” And then she turned to the captain. “May I thank him before I go?”

  The captain said, “Yes. I suppose.”

  Lithra came to Kagen, and reached up on her toes and kissed him once, passionately. “Thank you for trying to save me. I have always loved you. And I always will.”

  She wrapped her arms around him and held him tightly, pressing her head to his chest. “I will remember the sound of your heart beating. Always.”

  He pulled against the ungiving restraints around his wrists, desperate to hold her close to him. He could do nothing. With his eyes filling with tears, he whispered, “You were my only love. You are. You’ll always be.” He swallowed hard, and she pulled away from him and walked between the crew members who took her back to her core. Back to nothing, forever.

  “Melie,” the captain said, “I’ll hear from you next unless there are any objections.”

  Both the owner’s representative and the first mate shook their heads, indicating they had no objections.

  So the captain said, “Do you have any idea what caused this behavior by your choice for Two Green?”

  Melie winced on hearing Kagen described in that fashion. Kagen didn’t blame her. He'd certainly not turned out to be the man she'd chosen to move up to Two.

  She said, “I’ve been investigating Mash for the last three months for intimidation of other crew members, and for attempting to fill all crew positions with his people. I admit that I somewhat misused Three Gold Kagen when I brought him into Two as my choice for Green. I’d previously made sure to mention Kagen among my Two unit as my best guess for eventual captain of the Longview, and while this was in fact true, I made sure to state it more than once in front of Mash.”

  Kagen watched her looking from face to face across the table. He could see her trying to figure out how all three listeners were taking this information. “So Mash was already inclined to hate Kagen. When Mash step-promoted into Two-Gold the same day Kagen became Two Green, Mash saw Kagen as a better-qualified rival for the job he planned to get, and further, as someone he needed to take down.”

  She sighed. “I could not warn Kagen about what I was doing without damaging the credibility of my investigation. I have not been able to explain my treatment of him to him—and I have not been kind.

  “So he’ll have to confirm this for you, but I suspect he took his treatment by Mash and me as signs that he had made an unfixable mistake, and I further suspect he thought he had lost his future on the Longview.

  “You see, Mash has been going behind him, sabotaging his work on Level Ten while ostensibly checking after him. He’s been writing Kagen up for every mistake he claims to have found. I was waiting for that noxious...” She stopped herself from saying whatever she had been planning to say, and started over. “I was waiting for Two Gold to submit his formal Request for Dismissal of Crew on Kagen before I sent my own results to you. I wanted you to be able to independently compare Mash’s documentation of errors with mine.”

  She pulled her shoulders back and lifted her chin. “One of my associates from Two says Mash has just about completed his dismissal request form. My informant expects it to go to you...” her gaze flicked to the clock, and she sighed, “...in six or seven more hours. Once Mash submits that request, I can bring forward everything I’ve found out about what he's been doing. This will include falsifying records on three other talented subordinate crew members, which resulted in one crewman being removed from crew and left without recommendation in the nearest Needle on our circuit, and the other two leaving the Longview before he could create his reports on them. I cannot prove the cases on the two who quit, but if you can search Mash's private files before he can delete them, you will probably find falsified documentation.”

  Kagen tried not to look as stunned as he felt.

  Melie had been working to get rid of Mash.

  She’d still thought he would have qualified as captain eventually.

  He was truly an idiot.

  “And your attempt to get the girl he’d liberated from her core back into her box before anyone found out?” Shay asked Melie.

  Melie dropped her head. “I was hoping to save both his career and my investigation.”

  “Because...?” the owner’s representative prodded.

  “Because I thought both of these actions would be in the best interests of the owner, the crew, Kagen’s career, and my own career.”

  “Both the owner and I are inclined to agree that they were,” Shay said, and glanced over at the captain. “The owner wants your first thoughts.”

  “If that damned report were in my hands already, I could simply demote her back to Two Gold and let her serve there for an extra year without counting that as overage on her time in grade.”

  “I’ll be happy to get the report in your hands within the next five minutes,” the first mate said. “I’ll simply go to Mash, let him know it looks like One Green may be opening up, and ask him if he has anything he can present to suggest himself as a suitable candidate for the opening.”

  “Do it,” the captain said, and the first mate shot out of the room like a man on fire.

  He was as good as his word.

  He wasn’t even back when the captain’s wristcom whispered to him, and he nodded.

  He turned to Melie. “That’s his report. Can you bring up yours?”

  She nodded. “If you can remove my restraints, I can transfer it to you from here.”

  He nodded to the crew member standing guard behind Melie. “Take them off her.”

  Kagen watched the crew member tap her wristcom and an instant later, the captain’s wristcom whispered to him again.

  He flicked a finger, and both reports appeared in the space in front of him, reversed from Kagen’s perspective. He flipped through each at tremendous speed, and after just moments, he said, “All right. The security detail is going to be delayed here just a bit longer. When I’ve finished with you and Kagen, I want night security and day security to go together, armored and armed, and pick up Mash and move him to the brig. I’ll come with you to get him out of his room without giving him the chance to destroy his private files, and to present the charges once you have restrained him.

  “Melie, you have two choices. You can either take what you’ve earned and cash out now, or you can be demoted to Two Gold with no promotion for one year, but no disqualification for the time spent.”

  She looked a little pale, but she said, “I’ll stay.”

  And then the captain turned to Kagen.

  “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  Kagen considered. “I did what seemed to me the most just and proper thing I could, based on the situation I believed myself to be in and on what I knew of the girl in the core unit.” He paused, still thinking, then decided to add, “Because of who Lithra is to me, and because she should never have been sentenced to death, I would do the same thing again if opportunity presented itself.”

  The captain sighed. “Thank you for your honesty, no matter how damaging to your case it happens to be.”

  He stared down at the table, drumming the fingers of his right hand on the surface in an irritable, quick pattern.

  He sighed again. “You have done a brilliant, irreversible job of destroying what has been one of the most promising careers I’ve seen anyone put together. You have demonstrated an impulsiveness that makes you impossible to keep on as a crew member. You have destroyed the shipowner’s property, have released a convicted criminal from a mandatory death sentence, and have allowed emotion to sway you into dereliction of duty.

  “By any standard of space law, I have the absolute right to drop you off at the nearest Needle with no papers, no recommendation, and no money, and let you fend for yourself. Furthermore, that is the sentence that best fits within my guidelines as Longview captain.”

  Kagen braced himself.

  The captain looked at the ship’s representative. “Does the owner wish to involve himself in sentencing?”

  Kagen watched Shay listen to her shipcom, nod, murmur something he could not hear, and then say, “As you wish.”

  She turned to the Kagen directly. “The owner wishes to pass sentence himself, if the captain will defer.” She turned to the captain.

  “I’ll defer. Happily, in this instance.”

  “Very well. Kagen, you have been given two choices. Because the owner was moved by Lithra’s story of her love for you, and by what you tried to do for her—ignoring the criminality of what you did—he has chosen to impose a lighter sentence than what the captain would have to make.

  “Your first choice is to select a world on our circuit on which you’ll debark. You’ll take with you all money you earned on the Longview, and will leave with only your record up to the end of your stint in Three Gold. No mention will be made of your promotion, your test scores or points toward promotion. You will go out as a Three Gold who chose to terminate with the Longview in search of other employment, and who became a passenger when you made this decision so that we could train your replacement while you were aboard.”

  He looked at her and swallowed hard.

  “You wish to say something?”

  “That’s... very generous.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “It is.” She stared into his eyes, and he felt himself wanting to squirm.

  “Your other option is... very different. The owner has offered to make a core unit available to you. If you choose to take this option you will wait, exactly as Lithra is waiting. At some point in the future, the laws under which she has been sentenced to death may be changed, or the government that sentenced her may cease to exist in its current political structure, or the Pact may change its ruling on the death sentence, at which point her sentence will be negated, and she will be freed. If this happens, you will be freed along with her. Neither of you will be any older than you are now, and you will at that time be able to pursue whatever relationship you may desire.”

  She was still looking into his eyes, searching for some truth about him that he could not begin to guess.

  “Understand,” she continued, “that there is no guarantee she will ever be released, and hence, no guarantee that you will ever be released. There is no guarantee that you will still love each other if you are, and no guarantee if you do that you will have any sort of future together. Your current existence will stop when you are in the core, and may never resume. Your money will accrue for you—the owner will treat it as a Level Two crew investment, since this appears to have been the point of contention that caused your dispute with Mash. But there is no guarantee that you will ever claim it.”