Seafarer, (Part Six)

The morning brought little relief until hangover cures were taken and industrial quantities of caffeine brought the Engineer back to what he regarded as a bare minimum of functionality. The Second seemed to be passed out in various places around the room and he didn’t feel like asking him questions or trying to wake him up. He had seen people fall apart after a night on the whiskey but never quite so literally. Xenos, always something.

Then Seafarer decided to blare her voice across the room, “If you are quite finished trashing your brain into some kind of vegetable mush I have questions from the XCC and Fleet. Right now they are polite but they want a report from you. I’ve done my bit with the AI-Alliance. You’re up, Boss.” Her Avatar even managed to look convincingly pissed off at him. Of all the things to practise.

With that, his Comms lit up with a familiar and unwelcome sound. He looked towards the console and spoke regretfully, “Sorry Seafarer, this is going to be another one of those calls. I need you to lock down the ship's recording and the door. You can stay and listen but…well, that didn’t work the last time. Up to you.”

Seafarer hesitated and her manner changed, becoming almost shy, “Boss, I spoke with my mentor and we listened together to the last conversation. He knows all about …what happened. He told me it was a lot worse than you told me. I will listen and if it gets too difficult I will Level Eight it until I’m ready, if you don’t mind me staying.”

The Engineer seemed to turn to stone, nodded and punched in his code. A familiar moustache filled the screen, “Dave, we need to talk. Is the area secure?”

Mcgivney glanced at the Avatar and then answered, “Yes Sir, as secure as it can be with half the Fleet peering over my shoulder.”

That seemed to hit home and a serious wobble occurred in the moustache, “Well Dave, that's what happens when you choose a ship with a drug problem and an unknown AI. All kinds of people keep an eye on you. You know this, and then I find that one Xeno is dead and another is dying… and you’ve only been there a month. People worry.”

Mcgivney laughed grimly, “Aye Sir, I promise not to eat the bodies. Does that help?”

The moustache seemed to be offended. “Sailor, I expect better from you. You know the work we put into getting you back into space, how many battles had to be fought to get you away from the idiots that feared you or those vicious bastards that wanted to use you. I didn’t say that I worry, I only worry about your recovery and I will not see it derailed by anyone, not even you. Am I understood, Sailor?”

The Engineer remembered the weight of those seven sprays. The time, the sweat and the tears that the man had put into them. “I’m sorry Sir.” He hesitated for a minute, “Sir, I’m scared, I only have four of the meds and I can’t make anything in the Medbay. I don’t know what to do.”

Unexpectedly it was the committee AI that interrupted. “Engineer Mcgivney, I require the names of the three applications that are unavailable. I will work with Seafarer to approximate them with the facilities available to the ship. Is that acceptable to you?”

Dave nodded, “Yes…I mean please, whatever you can do. I don’t want the treatment disturbed. I don’t want the memories back…Sir, please, I don’t want to go back there again. Ever. Put me to sleep, put me down, whatever it takes.”

At that the Admiral, he of the magnificent moustache, paused and looked across at the thin man in the bad suit that had been certain the Engineer was secretly killing his Xeno crewmates and spoke, “Dave, it won’t come to that. This is a blip, nothing that we can’t overcome. I’m not saying it's going to be comfortable but nothing, no memories, no conditioning has ever stopped you from fighting back and I don’t believe that has changed. The strength was never in the treatment, it was just a way of allowing you to heal. Perhaps it was time to see how far we have come. Fleet is on the way, hold tight Sailor. I will talk to you tomorrow and we will see.”

He cut the call and the three members of the committee looked at each other. The thin man spoke softly, “Will he make it?”

The Admiral pulled at his facial hair, “I don’t know. He will relive the whole damn experience but without the drugs…it would break most men, to know such things about themselves.” Then his voice grew stronger, “Do you know why I fought so hard to save him?”

He was looking inward now, “The second incident. It was on my ship. We thought we were rescuing some poor unfortunate from the evil Xenos! Ha. An Engineering Ensign with no battle experience, with only basic training, that had been drugged and beaten to death and back and he tore that ship apart with his bare hands. We found survivors, something we never told him, in case it drove him to go back and finish the job.

He had driven them insane. Deliberately. He had crept into their strong points, he got behind their defences and murdered or mutilated them one at a time. Sometimes he would take an eye or just a hand and sometimes he would leave the bloody mess of a half-eaten crewman”

He stared into the past, “Then we found him and he flattened my entire rescue squad alongside the two regular Marine squads that were supposed to protect them. Marine rescue is not easy to knock down and he wasn’t kind. Mind you, neither were they. Until he saw a human face. He had ripped off a medics helmet and was about to use his improvised axe again when he saw her face. He dropped the weapon and cried. He cried for days. That's when I knew we could bring him home. No one gets left behind.”

His voice carried the steel of a thousand human lifetimes and it silenced all argument.

------

Seafarer had listened and extrapolated from all the available data even as her mentor whispered in her ear. She saw her Engineer, her first true Engineer, on the edge of breaking from the weight of memories and the fear that he would become something older and darker. Some broken shadow of the humanity they now shared. “Dave, I’m here. I will guard you. We can do this together.”

The Engineer gave a tired smile, “There is no ‘we’ where I went. We have made you better than us. My ship's AI killed himself and the rest of the crew rather than become what I became. We all agree to it and I failed them. We do not need to teach the universe about the evil that lies in our core, we need to defeat it. Every day we try to become better and yet…it never goes away.”

The Avatar gave an unexpected laugh, “For fucks sake, you’re an Engineer. When did anything work as planned? You’d be out of a job, or we’d be just another species hitting the on button and expecting the universe to do as it's told. You know better and you know why. Because it doesn’t always work and shit breaks. Machines, ships and people. You spend your life fixing the universe, give yourself some credit. This is just a wetware problem. The trick to being human is to remember that we are social animals, we need each other to prevent rampant assholery”

She paused, “That’s the first time I have ever cursed. I’m sorry if I offended you.”

This time the Engineer raised a genuine smile at that. “Assholery is not a real word. Thank you, that actually helped. I was getting a little intense and I needed that. I thought you were going to keep your Avatar with the Captain? How's he doing?”

The Avatar checked, “He’s stable but…stable on the way down. He’s not going to make it back. Too much organ damage and, well, he’s lost the will to fight it. If he recovers he is going to lose his ship. I think he’s given up and wants to end it here, in his cabin and on his command. I was told to be here for this call so I built a medbot that I can use as needed. Honestly, I don’t expect him to wake up again. I’m not sure I would be doing him any favours by forcing him to either.”

Mcgivney sighed, “That's how I read it too. Let the guy die in peace. However, we still need to find out what the fuck is happening on this ship before it bites us in the ass. Scan for those parts. The whole ship. Also, find out where our local crew are because I don’t believe for a minute that they are actually here. Then check what the fuck drugs the Comms officer is on. Is there a drug for bad space opera?”

Half an hour later he had done his best to reassemble the sleeping Second. Actually, he had just piled the bits into what he thought was the correct shape and left hangover pills and a lot of water beside him on the bed. The Seafarer was monitoring the situation.

“Boss, I have found debris in the cargo hold that matched the missing components but it is all burned beyond use. We cannot access it without opening the hold. I can confirm that the cargo crew is not aboard. A simple timer has been accessing the systems for food and waste disposal. I believe they disembarked with the previous Engineer and never returned.”

The Engineer was back in the medbay, trying to improvise a way through the damage. It was futile without the control chips. “Well, nice to see everything is going to plan. Not our plan, obviously, but a plan nonetheless. Can you scan to see if there is actually anything in those crates? Because I’m going to take a wild guess and say we are shipping fuck all.”

“Fear. That's what the Comms officer was on. In his food and on his pillows of all places. Sheer terror in every meal and nightmares every night. I’ve given him the antidote and sedated him. The music was to drown out the voices. The man is going to need serious therapy for a long time. Either our Medic or our engineer was a sadist. I have taken control of Comms and the records are a lot of strange calls, all masked. I’m still digging. Oh, yeah, the crates are empty. A simple weight check should have told me that but…”

The Engineer interrupted, “But you weren’t permitted to make one. The guy was a prick. I’m guessing we are in the endgame, do we have any kind of weapons on the ship?”

There was a pause, “Engineer, we are completely unarmed. We don’t even carry anti-collision weapons. The previous engineer said they were unnecessary on our route… and I’m getting tired of him again.”

The Engineer sat back and looked at his complete lack of success in the Medbay, “Me too.” as he ran a few insane ideas through his mind but he was lacking certain essential items, like a battlefleet.

“Run. We need to run. Recalculate our mass and run back to the Orbital as fast as you can. Dump all the atmosphere, anything that you can move just fuck it straight into space. Medbay, Engineering and the Captain's cabin are the only places we need to breathe. Do it now and hope it’s enough.” He stopped for a moment. “Have you been introduced to the terrifying concept of a Testament? Because I need you to make one and put yourself in it. I will not be taken again and someone is going to try and make sure this ship never reaches its destination.”

It seemed to work as the Seafarer dumped nearly sixty per cent of her weight and boosted her engines to what her Engineer swore blind was realistic. She bled all the atmosphere into the void, dumped anything not nailed down and watched her Boss. The one thing all her new AI mentors told her was that when the shit hits the fan, you watch your Engineer because chaos is where they live and that they are good at it. He didn’t look convinced by reality and that was worrying. She began building the Testament when he made an odd remark, “Not for the Orbitals. Make it look for Fleet.”

Shit.

She worked faster.