Expendable Read online

  When he talked, his enunciation was unfailingly precise. Since it cost him a great deal of effort, he preferred not to speak if he could help it.

  I had known Yarrun six years, first in the Academy, then on the ship. We had saved each other’s lives so often we no longer kept count. We could talk to each other about anything, and we could be quiet together without feeling uncomfortable. I was as close to Yarrun as I have ever wanted to be with anyone.

  And yet.

  There were still times when the sight of his face made my skin crawl.

  In the Halls (Part 1)

  The halls were deserted at that hour. The ship only needed a twenty-person running crew at night, and the on-duty crew members usually stayed close to their posts. I loved to walk the empty corridors when the lights had been dimmed and every door was closed. Neither Yarrun nor I spoke. The soft clopping of our footsteps echoed lightly in the stillness of the sleeping ship.

  Our ship was called the Jacaranda, named after a family of flowering trees native to Old Earth. The previous captain had actually owned a jacaranda tree and kept it in his quarters. When it was in bloom, he would pin a blossom to his lapel every morning. The deep blue of the flower went well with khaki.

  When our current captain took command, she said, “Get that damned thing out of my room. It’s shedding.” The tree was moved to the cafeteria, where it got in everyone’s way and frequently dropped petals onto plates of food.

  A few months later, the tree suddenly died. Someone probably poisoned it. The crew held a party to celebrate the tree being reduced to protonute, and even I attended. It was the first time I tasted Divian champagne.

  Now the only jacarandas on ship were stylized ones stenciled on walls and doors. The colors of these trees indicated the authorization needed to enter a given area. I was allowed into areas marked with red jacarandas and black. I was not permitted to enter rooms marked with orange, blue, green, yellow, purple, pink, or brown.

  Red areas were public ones like the cafeteria. Black areas were reserved for Explorers and their equipment. The Admiralty denied that black had any special significance.

  Our Captain

  The jacaranda on the door of the conference room was red. The door opened as it heard our footsteps approach. Yarrun let me enter first—in public, we made a point of observing rank protocol.

  Captain Prope stood at the room’s Star Window, apparently lost in thought. She stared out on the star-filled blackness like the captain of a clipper ship inhaling sea air from the foredeck: spine straight as iron, hands on hips, head tilted back slightly so her chestnut-red hair hung free of her shoulders. If she had been facing us, we would have likely seen her nostrils flared to the wind.

  No doubt she had assumed this heroic pose several minutes ago, and had been waiting impatiently for us to walk in. For some reason, she desperately wanted to impress us.

  The door closed behind us with a hiss. Prope took this as her cue to turn and notice us. “Oh, come in, sit down, yes.” She laughed lightly, a frothy little laugh guaranteed by Outward Fleet Psych-techs to make subordinates feel like equals. Prope was an ardent student of the Mechanics of Charisma.

  “Sorry,” she said. “My mind was somewhere else.” She turned back for one more wistful peek at the night. “I can never get over how beautiful the stars are.”

  I did not point out that the view was a color-enhanced computer simulation. A real window would have jeopardized the integrity of the ship’s hull.

  The News

  We sat in our usual chairs (me on the captain’s right, Yarrun on her left), and rolled up to the conference table.

  “Would either of you like coffee?” the captain asked. We shook our heads in unison. “You’re sure? Some fruit juice maybe? No? Well, I hope you don’t mind if I have a little something. I always enjoy a midnight snack.”

  She smiled in our general direction, but her eyes were too low to meet ours. Like most people, she could not look at our faces for any length of time. She talked to our chests or our hair or our ears…never to our faces, except for a quick glance now and then to confirm her squeamishness.

  For some reason, she thought Yarrun and I didn’t notice.

  We watched as she poured herself coffee. In public, she drank it black. When she thought no one was watching, she used double loads of cream and sugar.

  For a few moments, she stirred her coffee, even though there was nothing in it. I couldn’t tell if this was reflex or affectation. Finally she said, “I suppose you’re wondering what this is all about.”

  She paused, so we nodded.

  “Twenty minutes ago,” Prope continued, “I received a coded message from the Golden Cedar. You know the ship?”

  “Admiral Chee’s flagship,” I replied. Everyone in the Fleet knew the ship. Half the children in the Technocracy had heard of it. Learning the names of the admirals and their flagships was a Common Curriculum memory exercise for seven-year-olds.

  “In three hours, the Golden Cedar will pass within ten thousand kilometers of us.” Prope was watching us out of the corner of her eye, so I knew she was about to drop a surprise in our laps. “At that time, Admiral Chee will secretly transfer aboard the Jacaranda. Very secretly—we three and Harque will be the only ones to know he’s here. You two will see to the admiral’s comfort.” She looked at us with narrowed eyes, as if she doubted we could handle the job. “Any problems?”

  “We’ll take care of him.” I kept my voice expressionless, despite the insult. I had been capably dealing with visiting dignitaries for six full years on the Jacaranda—it was one of my standing duties. As high-ranking officers with no shipboard responsibility, Explorers were ideal for babysitting VIPs. VIPs were either aliens who didn’t care what we looked like or self-centered diplomats who didn’t notice.

  “Fine.” Prope obviously felt she ought to say something more, but couldn’t think of anything. She remembered her coffee and took a deep grateful swallow. Judging by the resulting expression on her face, the coffee was too hot.

  Yarrun asked, “Do you know why the admiral is coming?”

  “He’ll tell us when he arrives. All I know is that it’s not an inspection.” She gave another standardized laugh, but this time it was strained with nervousness. “My orders say that if I give the slightest hint I’m waiting for inspection—if I sharpen up discipline, hold drills, even swab the decks—I’ll be put on report.”

  She drummed her fingers on the table. None of us said anything for a count of ten.

  “It certainly sounds like an inspection,” I finally said.

  Prope nodded. “Damned right.”

  My First Admiral

  Back in my cabin, I debated staying awake for three more hours (in which case I would be tired when the admiral arrived) or going to sleep for a while (in which case I would be groggy). I decided to lie on my Luxuriator bed and see what happened.

  Staring at the asbestos white of my ceiling, I thought about the first admiral I had met, Admiral Seele. She was not the first admiral I had seen in person—more than a dozen admirals attended graduation exercises for my class at the Academy. The Admiralty always made a show of being interested in Explorers. The school administrators even said the admirals would be available afterwards to shake hands and make small talk.

  I don’t know if any of the class took advantage of the opportunity. I didn’t.

  Admiral Seele arrived on the Jacaranda in my first year with the ship. No one could say why she had come. She inspected the engine room, but made no comments or suggestions. She spent an hour alone with every officer, but reportedly spoke only of trivialities and glanced frequently at her watch. She passed one entire day secluded in her cabin, supposedly examining our ship’s log on the computer…but when I walked by her door late in the afternoon, I heard her singing a bawdy song I recognized from Academy days. I hurried on, though I had intended to knock.

  The admiral spent most of her time with me. It made me uncomfortable, even as I told myself I
had nothing to fear. Mostly, we talked about the Academy and my missions. I had made only two Landings at the time, neither one eventful, but she seemed interested. Her questions showed she knew what was important to an Explorer…unlike most Vacuum-oriented officers, who had no idea what to pay attention to when they had solid ground under their feet. I guessed that part of being an admiral was knowing more than the rest of the pack.

  On the last night of her stay, she asked how well I got on with the crew. Were they cooperative? I said I had no complaints. Did I have many friends? No. Any lovers? No. Was I lonely? No, I filled my time. Did I never want to reach out to another human being? No, I was fine.

  She started to cry then. She tried to take hold of my hand, but I drew back quickly. She said I mustn’t close myself to the world; I would be miserable if I didn’t let other people into my life.

  I walked out of the room without waiting to be dismissed.

  The next morning, Admiral Seele left us at Starbase Iris. As she left, she saluted the captain and first officer, but shook my hand. She looked like she wanted to kiss me. Perhaps she couldn’t decide where: on my lips, on my good cheek, or on my bad one.

  I concluded then that my first admiral was a maladjusted woman who yearned for me. The Academy had taught us about people who are drawn to Explorers by our ugliness. The attraction has something to do with self-hatred.

  Self-Care

  The message buzzer hummed and I found I had been sleeping. My neck was stiff and my clothing rumpled. I rolled gracelessly to my feet and thudded over to the desk. “Ramos here.”

  Harque’s face appeared on the screen. Wearing his dress gold uniform, he looked annoyingly fresh and knew it. “Admiral Chee is arriving.”

  “Thank you. I’m on my way.”

  “If I were you, I’d do something with my hair first.” The screen went blank too quickly for me to reply. Clever retorts seldom come easily to me. I stomped angrily to the bathroom and fumbled a while with a comb. Stupid people flustered me so effortlessly. I wished I had a quick mind.

  Years of conditioning would not let me leave my room until my part was straight. That irked me too. What fastidious programmer forced this obsession on me?

  To smooth my feathers, I thought of childish ways to get even with Harque. Some scandalous story about him passed to the admiral? No, I was too smart to lie to an admiral, and too ill-informed to know any dirt that was really true. Some night Harque would pull down the sheets of his bed and find a smashed egg there. The Sevro lizards of Malabar IV laid eggs whose yolks were more corrosive than industrial acids.

  Wearing a smile and taking great pride in my personal appearance, I stepped confidently out my door.

  Part II

  MISSION

  Worm, Sperm

  WORM: The colloquial name for the envelope of spacetime distortion that surrounds each starship, allowing the ship to circumvent relativistic and inertial effects that would otherwise make space travel impracticable.

  —Excerpt from Practice and Procedures of Space Travel: An Overview for Explorers, textbook published by the Admiralty

  Only the Admiralty would have the nerve to claim that the colloquial name for our envelope was “the Worm.” To everyone else (except in the presence of admirals), it was “the Sperm.”

  REASON 1: When a ship was at rest, the region of interface between its envelope and normal space glowed milky white due to spontaneous creation of particles in the envelope’s ergosphere. The glow shifted to the blue end of the spectrum when the ship moved forward and to the red when the ship reversed, but the color we saw most, the color at anchor, was that suggestive semen white.

  REASON 2: The envelope bulged like the head of a spermatozoon where it surrounded the ship itself, then tapered off into a thin tail that stretched some 15,000 kilometers to our stern. In flight, random fluctuations of magnetic fields in space made the tail whip wildly like the tail of a swimming sperm.

  REASON 3: Given time, a ship’s crew will attach sexual innuendo to anything. It makes their jobs more exciting.

  Walting In the Transport Room

  When I reached the Transport Room, Lieutenant Harque was grimacing at the tracking holo and gingerly twisting dials. Captain Prope leaned over his shoulder and blocked his light. Each time the lieutenant ducked to one side to see more clearly, the captain moved with him like a shadow. I’d seen the routine many times before, and Harque had never asked the captain to step back.

  Vile little toady.

  In the rare moments that he had a clear view of the holo, Harque was manipulating our aft electromagnets in order to wag the tail of our Sperm. Somewhere far behind us, the Golden Cedar was doing the same thing, with the goal of snagging one tail on the other and forcing the two to fuse into a single continuous tube. It was a ticklish business at the best of times, and worse with a captain breathing down your neck. The best operators in the Fleet sometimes spent more than twenty minutes at the job. Harque was not one of the best operators in the Fleet.

  Yarrun sat against the far wall of the room, well out of everyone’s way. He looked more alert now; either he had managed to get some sleep or had forced himself awake with a cold shower, caffeine, something. From the depths of his closet, he had rummaged up his dress blacks, as wrinkled as raisins. Every stitch of clothing Yarrun owned was rumpled and worn; he came from a splinter culture on Novolith with a religious stricture against vanity in one’s attire.

  Thanks to Explorer programming, Yarrun was just as obsessive in keeping his clothes mussed as I was in keeping my hair parted straight.

  I inflated a chair and sat down beside him. “Are they close?” I asked in a low voice.

  He shrugged. “Since I arrived, the captain has shouted, ‘You almost had it!’ three times.”

  “Has she called him a fool yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then they aren’t close.”

  Yarrun and I had spent a lot of time waiting in that room. We knew each bleep, chirp, and fribble the machinery could make. We knew each bleep, chirp, and fribble a tail-operator could make. After a while, the noises blended into a harmonious whole.

  “You almost had it that time, Harque! Can’t you be more careful?”

  “Sorry, captain.”

  The observation deck where we sat was a U-shaped mezzanine around the actual transport bay, twelve meters below and separated from us by thick pink-tinted plastic. The walls around us sported rainbow-striped jacaranda trees; this was the first area most visitors saw when they came on board, and Prope was desperate to make a jaunty impression.

  The control console occupied the base of the mezzanine U. Opposite it, down in the bay, was the Aft Entry Mouth, a circular aperture leading out of the ship and into the Sperm-tail. At present, the Mouth was closed with an irising mechanism that bulged slightly outward under the air pressure of the ship. When the iris opened, anything in the transport bay weighing less than twenty tonnes would be propelled out the Mouth and spat through the tail like phlegm.

  It wasn’t an elegant way to travel—Admirals usually arrived in trim little shuttles, as did delicate cargo shipments—but receiving such deliveries meant dropping our Sperm field, then waiting twelve hours while the forward Sperm generator rebuilt the envelope. It only took a second to reestablish the field itself…but aligning the tail to surround the ship rather than drift off on its own demanded extensive calibration efforts that always left the crew in a foul mood. Either the High Council of Admirals had decided not to put the Vachands through that strain, or Chee’s business with the Jacaranda was too urgent for any delay.

  I was glad it was Chee being transported, not me. Though I had squirted through the tail more than a hundred times, I never enjoyed it. Some Explorers did. Yarrun said it felt like a ride at an amusement center: your feet swooped out from under you, your brain dimmed to black, the space-distorting forces in the tail twisted you through a few hyperdimensions, and then you slid out the other end like sound emerging from a trumpet. Dozens of
people had done it without even wearing an impact suit (despite safety regs). The death rate was lower than any other form of transport used in the Outward Fleet.

  And yet….

  When I stood down there in my suit, waiting for the blue light that said the tail had been secured, I sometimes prayed something would save me from that five second ride. “Sorry, Festina, all a big mistake, you don’t have to go today.”

  I was a child who never believed in fairies, but still told herself fairy tales.

  Then the light went on, and I would look around one last time, at the rainbow jacarandas, at Yarrun counting the seconds until our ejaculation, and at the iris that waited, eyelike, ready to open.

  I always faced that iris full on. No tail-operator ever saw me flinch. Only Yarrun knew that I closed my eyes.

  The Arrival

  “Got it!” Harque cried with relief.

  “About time,” the captain growled. She twisted a knob on the console and spoke into a filament microphone. “Golden Cedar, this is Jacaranda. We have established connection.”

  There was a pause of several seconds as our computer coded the captain’s voice for transmission, squirted it to the Golden Cedar 20,000 klicks away, received an answer, and decoded it into sound. “Connection acknowledged. Prepare to receive.”

  As Yarrun and I moved to the observation window, the iris blinked open with the speed of a bubble popping. The plastic in front of us, thick as it was, jerked slightly as the air on the other side exploded into the tail, and one of the windows boomed like a drum. Harque and Prope ignored the sound, so Yarrun and I did too.

  “Mouth open and ready to receive,” Prope said into the mike. She said it with a straight face.

  Pause. “Acknowledged. Stand by.”

  Harque stifled a yawn as Prope looked at her watch. She pursed her lips in annoyance, then suddenly drew up into her most heroic stance, a calm smile taking possession of her face. “Let’s look alive, people,” she intoned, her voice half an octave lower than when she was kibitzing over Harque’s shoulder.