Authors: GP Joyner
Reyna quickly collected herself and the others followed suit. She rose, squinting in the spoor of rapidly cooling plasma that hung in the air, grateful that its temperature was dropping enough that it would only give them the equivalent of a sunburn as they made their way through it. "Let's go, people," she called, and the three of them were off down the corridor again.
_______________
Callum did not know what infuriated him more: that the creature on his bridge set directly into chewing up the instrument panels, or that it was completely ignoring him in the act. Callum, to this thing, was a mere flesh-and-blood human being. He was not something good to eat. He found it insulting in a perverse way that the Urchin would utterly disregard him and threaten his life only by consuming the ship around him. By munching its way through his bridge, it would eat through the central controls for artificial gravity, life support, the helm, and threatening to chew the deck right out from under him. At the moment it was gnawing at the Comm station, sending a shower of sparks and metallic and plastic shards that had made Callum leap and flinch back, throwing him off balance and down on his bottom. But he steadied himself and leapt back up at the same time as his anger and indignation over the beast's disregard stabbed inside him. Automatically, he raised his pulser, aimed, and fired. His combination of movements made the shot fire wild; the pulser beam stabbed up and out at an angle that grazed the upper part of the Urchin's mass and sent plasma spraying from its body into the air--and only now did the Urchin see fit to acknowledge his presence.
The Urchin whirled about, showing Callum the churning place in the front of its mass that did all the damage. With so little knowledge of Urchin physiology, it had long been assumed that the whirlpool-like orifice was an all-in one combination of mouth and sensory organs; it actually "saw" and ate with the same part of its body. Callum took it that he was now staring into the creature's eyes and mouth at the same time. Fine, then, he'd hit the plasmic bastard right where it lived. "Oh yeah, buddy,
now
you see fit to notice me!" he mocked it, knowing that the Urchin probably did not have enough sentience to appreciate being mocked. "Good; you ought to look a guy in the face when he's ready to vaporize you!"
Callum's indignant taunting cost him the upper hand. Emitting a keening, whining noise, the Urchin flailed out with one of its leg/claw appendages, stabbing it into the floor in front of Callum and forcing him to leap back and away once again. Callum spun back onto the deck and rolled onto his back. The Urchin loomed over him as if to gnaw its way into him. For a moment Callum wondered how it would feel to be chewed up in a maw of whirling plasma and spat out again in bloody shreds as something unpalatable. He opted not to find out and quickly climbed to his feet at the same time as the Urchin lunged downward and ripped into a section of the deck in front of him. It brought its maw back up again and Callum watched, angered and disgusted, as a huge piece of the deck of his bridge disappeared into the Urchin's whirling gullet with the most revolting noise of shredding metal and plastic. In reaction, the circuitry and conduits under the deck protested, spewing a geyser of sparks and vapor up into the air, shocking Callum and hurling him back against the bulkhead behind him.
"That's it, you son of a bitch," Callum winced and grimaced, a sharp pain spiking at the back of his head where it had hit the bridge structure. "That's the last bite you're taking out of my ship." The pain, likely at least a mild concussion, made Callum's vision blur and lose focus. The Urchin became an even uglier thing in his half-focused sight. He raised his pulser once more and forced himself to take a straight, dead aim. The Urchin loomed at him again, threatening him once more with the experience of being shredded alive, and in that instant Callum hit the trigger button. The pulser beam leapt forth and stabbed the Urchin right in its whirling mouth. The reaction was instantaneous. Callum's ears were filled with a sound like nails on an old Earth chalkboard mixed with an oncoming tornado, his eyes with something like sheet lightning through churning clouds. There was a brutal, punishing heat, and the slam of a shock wave hammering him into the bulkhead again. Then, everything was still, and he was only dimly aware of being crumpled on the floor.
He rolled over and looked up into the flickering lights of the bridge ceiling. His vision was fuzzy; he could see only the indistinct shape of a figure--a human figure--stepping in front of him and standing over him. He blinked and focused, and thought he must be somehow entering the mythical afterlife. How else to explain the vision looking down at him, the angelic apparition that looked so much like that Captain Talbot from the
Aureole?
He took the explanation with him, slipping away into darkness.
_______________
Reyna's crew got all of the injured off of the
Morrow
with all of the efficiency that she expected of them. They quickly transferred the
Morrow
crew who had gotten into escape pods on to the
Aureole
, then managed to take the
Morrow
in tow before it drifted too close to the whirling core of radiating neutrons at the center of the Xerxes Supernova Remnant. Pulling the
Morrow
behind it, the
Aureole
made good time out of the nebula. Reyna set course for the Briareus Station of the Stellar Patrol.
In the Sickbay of the
Aureole,
Reyna watched the medical personnel work and stayed out of the way of her Medical Officer, a Latina who fired off orders at her nurses like a commander on a battlefield--except to linger a bit at the bedside of the unconscious Captain Callum. The protein gel applied to the superficial burns on his face, neck, and hands would make short work of those injuries, and the mild concussion he had sustained would hardly trouble him with the care he was receiving. Watching him sleep under sedation, Reyna found her thoughts about him turning in some less than professional and disciplined directions, which she attributed to his simply being so damned handsome. Chasing these thoughts from her mind, she made her way out of the Sickbay to return to her own duties. But on her way out, she could not help stealing a last glance at the sleeping Ty Callum. With a sigh that only she could hear, she was on her way.
The
Aureole
docked at the Briareus Station. The crew availed themselves of a bit of shore leave, the people from the
Morrow
were likewise taken aboard and their injured were transferred to the Station's larger Sickbay, and the
Morrow
itself was put in drydock. After making her report in person to the Station Commodore, Reyna decided to head directly for Sickbay when the Station's comm channel notified her that Captain Callum was awake and asking for her. She found the skipping of her heart along the way as unprofessional and undisciplined as her thoughts at having him aboard her own ship.
She found him sitting up in bed in the Station Sickbay with only a fading redness on the parts of his skin where the burns were--and a smile not too broad but pleasingly warm to show her that he was happy to see her. But then, as she reached his bedside, she thought perhaps it was only that he was happy to see anyone who was not a medical professional at this point.
"Captain Talbot," he said. "Nice of you to drop by."
"Good to see you, Captain," said Reyna. "I'd have spoken to you sooner, but my ship's Doctor insisted on keeping you under during the day's travel to the Station, then once we docked here I was a bit busy helping your crew take inventory of the damage to your ship and initiate repairs. You and your crew are going to be here a while."
"Nothing like the hospitality of the Patrol', he said. Then, after a beat, his mood turned more sober. "Oh, hell, my ship. My ship. The
Morrow
took a hell of a lot worse beating than I did. The only thing worse than that is the crew members I lost. I've had people hurt, Captain. My crew and I have been through some rough things and some close calls. But this is the first time we've ever taken casualties. The idea that we haven't all come back alive from this voyage...it's hard to take. Damn hard."
"I'm sorry," said Reyna. "We have Counselors here aboard the Station. They're here for you and your people."
"Yeah. One of them's been by already. She was concerned and kind, of course. But my crew and I...we're kind of close knit. I think we'll be working out our feelings about this mostly between ourselves. They're taking the failure of this voyage almost as hard as I am. This one...you might say this one was personal."
Reyna found this curious. "This wasn't just business? I mean, not just for profit?"
"I know the assumption about me, Captain Talbot--and a crew like mine," Callum replied. "We're all mercenaries. Everything we're in for, it's only about what we can get. Our share of the Commonwealth isn't enough. Just the guarantee of all our needs always being provided for isn't enough. We're fortune hunters with Old Earth ambitions. It's nothing I haven't heard."
Reyna tensed up at that, a bit defensively. "I didn't mean to make a judgement, Captain," she said.
"People's judgement is automatic when it comes to us," Callum said. "We expect it. And...frankly, people are right. We are ambitious. I've even heard us called vulgar. And maybe we are. Maybe it's fair, what people think of us. We're not 'Protect and Serve' like you are. We're 'Search and Profit' all the way. And we're honest about it."
Maintaining her civility, Reyna said, "Listen, Captain Callum, I don't know anything about you. I respect you as a fellow Captain and I wanted to look in on you and see how you are. The reasons you do what you do are your own business. Wanting to know someone is all right when I've rescued them is mine."
Callum looked at her with narrowed eyes, then turned up just one corner of his mouth in a smile. "Then that was for real. That, when I passed out on my bridge after blasting that Urchin...that was for real. I saw you. You were there."
"Yes, I was," Reyna replied softly.
"I may not be in the Patrol," he observed, "but I know that's not necessarily standard procedure. Your place is supposed to be on your ship. You didn't have to be in the boarding party. Most Captains wouldn't be."
"It's my prerogative to go on any mission at my discretion," she said with authority.
"But you didn't have to," he argued.
An awkward silence followed that. Callum watched Reyna acknowledge with the way she looked away from him that he was right.
"You don't always do that," he pressed.
Reyna continued to look away, mildly annoyed at how right he was. When her eyes met his again a second later, she returned, "It was a unique situation. You were in danger from the Urchins and the pulsar."
"Which is that much more reason for you, the Captain and most valuable officer, to stay on your ship and let the boarding party do their job."
"I'm a Captain. My place is where I decide it is."
"You have a very interesting interpretation of Patrol Regulations, Captain."
This brought another awkward silence. Reyna was finding this man very presumptuous. Irresistibly presumptuous.
Opting to shift the discussion before she grew so annoyed with him that she'd have no choice but to grab him and kiss the daylights out of his smug, stubbly face, Reyna said, "You said this voyage was personal for you and your crew. I got the impression it wasn't just about profit. If it was something else, what was it?"
Callum paused at that, with a far-off look in his eyes, as if considering whether or not to answer. Then, he did. "We were going to extract the gold and the other precious elements out of the Supernova Remnant without having to go to the trouble of processing them the way we'd have to if we got them from asteroids. Taking elements from nebulae is a short cut; everyone knows that. And we were going to sell off what we collected. But we weren't going to keep the profits. Not this time. We had...something else in mind."
"What?"
Looking her right in the eye now, he replied, "The situation at Tau Eridani. You know what's going on there."