The Tribe of Trembo

Photo by Igor Omilaev

The Tribe of Trembo

By William Paul Jones

It’s tempting to close off from this group of my starship mates and focus on the euphoria, but bootleg ego-entanglement is best done with eyes open. It takes about ten seconds to feel the first tingles, another ninety for full effect. The world vibrates around the six of us like we’re caught inside an enormous, scintillating dragonfly wing—instead of lounging in my battlecruiser quarters. Soon we are the wing itself.

My gaze lands on Darha, sitting across from me. Her jaw is slightly agape, breath coming fast; typical for a person’s first time. What is she absorbing from me right now? Trembo will strip the solipsism right out of you; for these few moments, she flutters her way through my identity like laundry on a line.

I smile at Darha and reach out with one hand, a gesture of familiarity that she only tentatively returns. As my junior officer aboard a warship, protocol dictates that she only communicate with me, her superior officer, via salutes and crisply answered questions, but rules were made to be broken. We scoot until our knees are touching. Hands, legs, eyes, minds. Around us, our shipmates are doing likewise. The group swirls together by pairs and trios, trading our sense of self for a sense of us, simmering in a stew of our mutual emotions and memories.

“Oh, wow,” Darha breathes, her rich contralto full of pleasant shivers. I grin, my teeth reflected bright as stars in her soulful eyes. I can see her both with my physical eyes and her mind’s eye, a ghostly overlay of how she believes herself to look and sound and fit in with her colleagues around the Circle, elegant wisps of psychic steam trailing after her every movement. Her stiffness, which has always baffled me, now makes perfect sense. If I had been raised in her strict family, in her oppressive village, I would have a stiff spine, too. I was brought up with a kind of casual neglect, like you might have for a barely housebroken dog. I’ve always been bitter toward my family for that; Darha’s heart shows me that I was lucky to have the freedom to explore who I was and find joy in mischief.

A hand touches my shoulder: Colby, tears of laughter spilling out of his eyes. Trembo connects us. I can feel not only why he’s laughing—the way Darha said ‘wow’ reminds him of a comic actor from his childhood—but the building blocks of how his sense of humor formed in the first place: His mother’s silly crib side dances, his dog’s goofy greeting when he came home from school each day, playground jokes remembered and repeated for years, all bubbling off of his psyche and through mine. One single sense of humor shared by two people.

Anna DeVry, who most of the crew know as the soft spoken, honeybee-efficient Executive Officer of our TCPS Ludwig Quidde, bops joyfully to the music as she bursts with sexual desire for everyone in the room. Anyone Circling with her for the first time is inevitably shocked, but the Trembo oozing down our ear canals lets us feel her seething desire to be pinned beneath all of us at once and internalize that desire as our own. Shame is impossible to conjure.

I can build only one lifetime of memories, but through the joys of Trembo I can feel many more.

The lifeblood of our FTL displacement drive is Cassurus slurry, probably the single greatest scientific discovery in the history of humankind. That’s great and all, but the important bit for our purposes is that in the proper ratio, Cassurus particles (filtered through charcoal and certain silicate compounds) can be heat-treated and applied to elemental bismuth to get you super high. The end product—my end product—is technically called NT-Trembonalsintrethlytine (TBST), but around here we’re not so formal. Trembo will do.

Trembo is very illegal, but if they didn’t want me using reactor fuel to cook illicit superdrugs, they should never have invented faster-than-light travel. That’s on you, R&D. Engineering is just here for the sex and music.

The air sparkles around us. Colby laughs straight through my ears and heart and history; every titter from each of us holds echoes of his pure joy. Anna braids Carlotta’s hair and Trembo conjures ghostly fingers on my scalp, infuses me with Carlotta’s excitement at having her hair styled for her wedding, worn smooth by years of memory for her but overwhelmingly fresh for me. My fingers lace with someone’s; it’s hard to say whose. Faces and intentions blend together. We sing, we kiss, we stretch and nuzzle like cats in a sunbeam. Lars recites some Shakespeare lines, and we all bask in the triumph he felt receiving his standing ovation for playing Falstaff on opening night back in university. The six of us are happy in the way that puppies are happy in their creche or snakes in their hibernaculum, but we are more together than any of them, wrapped in our self-reinforcing spiral of love and peace.

And then there’s a knock on the damn door.

We all jump, the spell broken. Our terrified eyes are on the door. We must look guilty as hell. I sweep up the spent ear droppers with my hands and conceal them under a pillow.

“Battle stations in ten,” comes a stage whisper through the door. A courtesy warning about an upcoming drill; one of my other customers, looking out for us. Perfect timing.

It’s a harsh reminder that there’s a world outside our little haven. A cold, antiseptic hallway lurks just outside that door, an entire battlecruiser that we are supposed to operate, the peace and love in our hearts notwithstanding.

“Sorry everyone,” I say genuinely, passing out little packets of nullifier gel. “Sober up fast. We’ll try again tomorrow, same time, but we’ll use Anna’s cabin this time.”

“I’ll have a newbie to join us,” Anna announces as she drips the gel into her ears. “Don’t worry, I was discreet when I made the offer.” As well she should be; Trembo production carries a hefty prison sentence, if I’m caught.

“That was…” Darha—rather, Junior Gunnery Officer Ganatra, now that we’re straightening uniforms—blinks rapidly, clearing my heart’s truth out of her eyes while we all straighten our uniforms. “Unexpected.”

I cup her cheek like a baby bird, unprofessional and delightful. “Welcome to the Big Circle.” It’s not just the few of us in this room, after all; she’s now part of our little secret society of understanding.

The All-Stations alarm clangs; so much for understanding. Crew pour into the hall, walking quickly to their stations. We never run; this is the Peace Service, not a rodeo.

The Ludwig Quidde is a battlecruiser, but I’m more a fan of the ‘cruiser’ part than the ‘battle.’ Our deployment is set by Earth calendar; eighteen-month rotations. We stopped by Eris to show the flag, then hopped out to Majaesa as formal support for a treaty with the local Secessionists, so recently beat down by our JOR-6 task force. Good timing on that; if I’d been rotated out from Sol just six months earlier, I would have been part of some heavy fighting. Too many friends lost that way. Too many Secessionists killed, for that matter; what’d they ever do to me?

I had a friend in JOR-6, the senior navigator aboard the Sophie Germain. An academy buddy, the only other guy at Anyang who played the dulcimer. The things we choose to be friends over, right? He had one of those rubber faces that could make you crack up without saying a word. One of my first Trembo buddies, too. We got deep in it together.

He doesn’t bear thinking about. Not anymore.

The forward engineering hub, affectionately called the Iron Wheel (Fe Hub, aren’t those shipyard contractors just the most clever bunch?) is my cramped little kingdom during battle ops. Six enlisted ratings hunch over screens around a central display. I know four of them very well, customers of mine. They hide their warm smiles behind military professionalism. I roll my eyes; my professionalism isn’t that great.

I take my seat in the holiday light display that is the engineering sub-chief’s chair. “Report?” I ask because I have to.

“Multiple contacts exiting D-space,” says Colby, his heart now separate from mine. “Unknown configurations. Stand by for scan.” Colby was blessed with attentive parents in a household that lacked sometimes for money but never for warmth, and he carries that same warmth with him. He only got into the Service for the veteran colonizer subsidies, all because he wants to live in the treetops of the gargantuan forests on Aranyani. It breaks my heart to see that free spirit locked up in this twinkling coffin.

Engineering readouts all around the room go from flat to spiky and the mass drivers on my projection raise their heads like sleeping dogs hearing the fridge open. The Ludwig Quidde is about to go weapons hot.

I know it’s a live fire exercise even before Captain Treba’s cold, hard voice slithers into my ear. “All crew, be advised. Safety protocols are disengaged, and all systems are active.”

My gut turns cold. My few friends in the Iron Wheel share worried looks. Usually, an exercise like this is the last step before an active deployment. Bad news for anyone who actually wants Peace from the Peace Service.

“Dev Keshav. It’s got to be.” That’s Vin, control bank two, disregarding chatter regs. I never liked romantic comedies until I got to know him—really got to know him, in the Circle way—just like he hated yogurt until he met me. Now, we see one another’s points. “The Old Man tapped them ANT yesterday.”

Dev Keshav is a prosperous colony, fifty million strong, a well-terraformed blue planet nearby in the SagArm. Farmers and religious pilgrims, mainly; I don’t know if there’s a single piece of military-grade hardware in the whole system. If they’ve been designated Antagonist: Novel Target, we could be knocking on the door of a massacre, a genuine atrocity like we all pretend never happens on our watch.

“Good,” says one of the other guys, one of the teetotalers. “If they revolt against the Dynasty, they deserve what comes to ‘em. They wouldn’t even be there if not for us, and now they want to cut and run?”

I take a deep breath. I can barely remember what it was like to hate people I’ve never met, to wish them instant death from orbit. Maybe I was never like that. I hope it wasn’t just the Trembo that changed my mind, but if it did, I’m grateful for the help.

Green wireframes representing mass drivers spit fast-moving tetrahedrons at other wireframes representing enemy freighters, an abstract cotillion dance of lethal high-tech weaponry. And to think those cannons are barely two hundred meters from where I lay my little pumpkin head at night.

The engineering readout shows clinical afterfire specs from our guns as three decommissioned freight haulers are shattered by our fire. I can’t help but imagine if there were people on those target hulks and what they’d be going through right now. Or what would happen planetside if that same bombardment was pointed straight down a gravity well at a population center.

Thankfully, I haven’t seen real action yet. We’re on a nice, easy patrol loop now through the inner SagArm, checking up on research stations and terraforming ops. No crimes against humanity for me, sir, but thank you all the same, sir.

Looks like I might not have that luxury for much longer.

After the drill I’m summoned to the bridge along with the other specialty command officers for the formal assignment of orders. It’s an outdated tradition in the Peace Service, but Captain Treba loves outdated traditions. We stand at attention and listen while Vice-Captain Moore dispassionately reads orders from the brass on Earth. Captain Treba sits stern at her elbow. I tremble at attention, tucking my thumbs against the seams of my trousers and biting my lip to keep from crying. The words ‘Pacify Separatists’ and ‘Political Example’ hang seething in the air, euphemisms doing a lot of heavy lifting to paper over a mission of mass murder by orbital firestorm.

I catch eyes with Lars across the room. He was my first customer on the ship, the only one I trust to help me actually produce and distribute Trembo. His work as an intelligence officer often sets us on different rotations, but just seeing him here is a comfort, until I note the pained cringe on his face. This deployment might be even worse than I’d thought.

When the Vice-Captain is done, she turns off her pad. The captain has words of his own. “With the successful test of this latest drill, I am happy to report the Ludwig Quidde in an excellent operational state.” There’s an unmistakable snarl under his titanium-hard tone. “I am confident that you will continue to perform exemplary service as we bring peace once again to the Dev Keshav colony.”

When we’re dismissed, the only thing I can think to do is throw myself into my work; my real work, I mean, making and distributing Trembo. To keep myself calm, I run through old boot camp cadences. …Down in the ocean, down in the grimy sea… A weird chant to teach in this Navy—they don’t even teach us to swim—but it helps with the nerves. …there’s a great white Shark, and he’s a-looking at me… Deep in the engineering access shafts, I can be alone and shut out the inhumanity. Trembo, at least, is a gentle calling.

My great-great-grandfather had a darling little business when he was in the Navy—that’s actual wet Navy, mind you, running on fission of all things—where he turned his billet into an opium processing plant. He was an engine tech on a support ship stationed somewhere called Hormuz, which conveniently allowed him to pick up poppy latex in one port, process it secretly aboard ship, and then sell it at a mark-up across the channel. The Service didn’t pay a lick at his rank, and he had a young wife to support on the other side of the world, not to mention my great-granddad baking in her oven.

The point is that I’ve got a legacy to fulfill, even if the Navy has moved from ocean to space. Getting my fellow crewmen loaded on the military’s dime is a family business, pretty much the only profitable thing my family gave me. Thanks, Gramps.

I run through the shutdown sequence for this particular section of reaction rods, my fingers as practiced as if typing my own name. My custom containment contraption suctions to the wall, then I twist the rod housing against its mechanical latch and pull it out a couple of inches. I have to steady my breathing in the pulsing blue plasma light, reminding myself that I did a good job on this. If the filter’s shields were faulty, I would have vaporized myself long ago. The fact that I’m still flesh and bone means that I’m not a half-bad engineer after all.

Cassurus particles stream into the containment housing. When the scale reads two kilograms I slide the reaction rod back into its housing, click it secure, and bring the section up to speed again. This section—‘C’ block, grid 9×4—is on a recog cycle right now, which means my covert shutdown won’t even show up as a blip on the engine power readout. Granted, the recog process report will show an anomaly, which would be a problem if I wasn’t the one in charge of the recog process report. I’ve got all the time in the world to doctor logs against the odd spot check. Besides, with performance scores as good as ours, the crew of the Ludwig isn’t under that much scrutiny.

Then I freeze. The realization hits me like a mass driver shell to the face: If I wanted to keep this battlecruiser from cruising into battle, I have the means right in front of me. I’ve never thought of myself as a saboteur, but an entire colony of innocent pilgrims are going to be vaporized from on high if the Ludwig gets underway as planned.

Empathy isn’t the right word. Trembo has given me the means to go far beyond empathy. I couldn’t consign those distant strangers to death any more than I would step in front of the barrage myself.

It’s like my hands are moving on their own. I already have plenty of Cassurus for my own purposes, but if I drain the right containment grid just a little bit more, we won’t be going anywhere for a couple weeks. Maybe long enough for the colonists to evacuate, get help, hide deep underground, whatever they can manage. Maybe the delay will be enough, maybe not, but I’m putting myself to the hazard to try.

Stop. Breathe. Shaky hands, be still. What I’m doing right now is dangerous; this is no time to forget operational security. I doctor the recog process report immediately; someone will definitely check it. A manual check on-site would reveal tampering, but the engineering officer called in for that kind of check would be me or Colby or Vin, and I’ve briefed them on how to cover for me. I never cook in my own cabin, for plausible deniability, and a coder friend greenlisted TBST emissions on the Ludwig’s atmospheric analyzers when we were last in dock. You really can’t be too careful when it comes to staying out of prison.

Sneaky-sneaky to my hidden access alcove where I stow the containment units in the wall behind a screen that I loosened in an air vent and start the cook. …Hey there sailor, I’m the king of the sea… That cadence rings hollow in my head. I wish it wasn’t so catchy. …If you want to get by, you gotta get through me…

I add a dash of ⁴⁵Si to my new Trembo titration and mark the time. Thirty-two hours until it needs to be taken off heat; wouldn’t want poison gas emanating from the access shafts, now, would we?

The Circle that meets in Anna DeVry’s cabin a few hours later is mostly the same as the one we aborted yesterday. Lars and Carlotta couldn’t get away from their duties, but Harriet and Petra made it back this time and Anna invited Bosun’s Mate Bo Xio for her first Trembo experience. We have to be careful about who we let in on our little coven, but if Anna vouches for Xio, that’s good enough for me.

“Hey partner,” Anna drawls when I arrive.

“Lieutenant Commander,” Xio snaps a salute.

Everyone else chuckles at the formality. I take the chair that Anna offers. “Aldin, please,” I correct her. “We don’t worry about rank when we’re in Circle.”

“Or outside of it,” Anna quips.

“Did Anna—Commander DeVry—tell you what to expect from all this?”

Bo shifts in her seat, as if she has no practice relaxing. “Yes, sir.”

The others shrug, helpless. “She’ll get over it,” David says. He should know. He was one of the first on ship to try my product, and one of the most familiar with its lingering aftereffects.

“Anyone want to say anything before we get started?” I ask. People sit up, gathering together, attentive in our closeness.

Harriet raises her hand. She looks more like a librarian than a weapons officer. I wonder how much of that is my influence. “Anna,” she starts, facing DeVry. “I’m really glad that we finally get to Circle together. I’ve been attracted to you since we first met.”

A giggle sweeps the group, seven grown military personnel tittering like schoolchildren around a spinning bottle. DeVry suppresses a grin.

“We’ll see what happens,” she demurs.

“Anything from you, Bo?” I ask.

Bo looks mortified by Harriet’s forwardness. “I am eager for the opportunity to take our esprit de corps to the next level,” she offers.

The rest of us chuckle. “That’s one way to put it.”

I pass around a few droppers from my pocket (99.4% saline, 0.6% TBST). “One, two, three.” As one, we break the seals. Half goes in one ear, half in the other.

The empathy that comes with a good Trembo roll is quite a dog to have on a leash; it’ll drag you where it wants to. There’s no filter on any of us. Xio and I fall into it with one another, and I get a sense not just of what she’s thinking and feeling right now, but of her, a visceral sense of her identity. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the image begins at the edges and fills in. Looking at her next to me in my circle of colleagues, I can see her not just with my own eyes, but with hers; how she sees herself in the mirror, in photos, inside her own head. I can feel her intense need to fit in with the rest of the crew, her insistence on formality to give her life structure, her pride at doing right by her family. I’ve never met her family in my own skin, but little by little I get a sense of them, of her friends, of her childhood bullies and her favorite pets and which of her old flames she still pines for. Punchlines to inside jokes roll through our collective perception, and even though I can’t pinpoint their origins, I find myself chuckling, nonetheless.

Looking at me, Xio goes through the same thing. It would be nerve wracking under normal conditions, opening myself up so completely to someone else, but at this moment Xio couldn’t take advantage of me any more than I could take advantage of myself. She’s hearing the symphony—and the cacophony—of my everyday identity for the first time, luxuriating in feelings that I barely notice within myself after years of constant use.

The headmaster at my boarding school used to say, “To know someone is to love them.” He usually said it right before he whacked me with a paddle, so I didn’t put too much stock in it. I also used to wonder, does that mean my family doesn’t love me? Shipping me off, out of sight and out of heart?

But after taking part in a few Circles, I think the old coot was onto something.

David infuses me with a love for the saxophone. Darha’s shyness lurks comically behind Harriet’s lust. Carlotta isn’t here this time, and her simple ticklish joys are replaced by Bo’s fastidiousness; I can now see every speck of dust in corners I’d previously thought clean. We are a unique stew of emotions and talents and peccadillos that can’t be separated any more than you could pull spread butter back off of the bread.

After two hours the love fest begins to die down, barriers of sight and sound and skin papering over our sense of a collective. My face hurts from laughing, my eyes are red, my tears of pathos all cried out. I stretch out and enjoy the comedown, absently squeezing a small rubber ball that DeVry keeps around for stress relief.

In the wake of our supreme relaxation, the metallic doom lurking just outside presses in. Dev Keshav looms on our collective horizon. No one is looking forward to it.

“Join the Navy, they said. See the galaxy, they said.” Everyone joins DeVry on the last line.

“The seeing isn’t so bad,” David offers. “The killing, though, they really underplayed that at the recruitment office.”

“Nakshatra,” Petra pipes up, naming a Secessionist colony that our fellows in JOR-2 just suppressed with prejudice. Three million dead, they say. “Matsya. Amman Aatma.” More of the same. Bad news, bad omens.

One by one we all pull ourselves from the floor. “Two weeks, keep me in mind.” That’s a good policy, limiting your Trembo use. More frequent use can bring addiction, insomnia, and indigestion. Extremely frequent trips can cause spinal cancer. I run a safe operation.

Bo throws her arms around both me and DeVry. One-eighty from the tightwad we sat down with. “Thank you. And thank you.”

I giggle along with her. “Anytime, Bosun’s Mate Xio,” I tease. “Welcome to the real crew of the Ludwig Quidde.”

She leaves, and the rest of us aren’t far behind her. Except for Harriet. As I’m leaving, she lingers to raise an eyebrow at Anna. “Oh, hell yes,” Anna grins. I chuckle as I leave them behind. A job well done.

I practically skip back to my quarters. This tub can feel sterile on most days, but after a good Circle it’s like a living organism. By this point I’ve Circled with most of the crew, and each successive experience brings all those past trips to mind. I pass a few fellow officers that I know especially well; they can see it in my face.

All that comes crashing down when I unlock my cabin. I freeze in the doorway. Two security officers block the door. Behind them stands Vice-Captain Moore.

“Lieutenant Commander Anker,” the Vice-Captain is unfailingly polite, but there’s iron in her speech. I get the impression of a lizard ambush-hunting insects with infinite, unblinking patience. “So good to see you. Would you accompany us to the brig, please?”

I’m already a little sweaty from the Circle, but even if I wasn’t, you’d better believe I’d be sweating now.

I’ve envisioned being thrown into the brig for two years now. I suppose some would consider it inevitable in my line of work. It actually isn’t terribly uncomfortable; no arms on the chair, but it does have a cracked synthetic cushion. The overhead lighting is even pleasantly dim.

I’ve been waiting for a few hours when Vice-Captain Moore finally walks through the door, a tablet in her hand. Her long black hair is her only concession to fashion, cut not one centimeter shorter than regulation demands. She gives me the spiel you see on all the military justice dramas, cites the Service code that guarantees my rights, checks in that I’m mentally and physically sound.

Then, “Are you a maker and/or dealer of the drug TBST?” No more preamble than absolutely necessary. At least she’s consistent.

“I’d like to speak to a barrister.”

“You are not entitled to legal counsel while on active cruise.” She cites more Service legal code. I have to take her word for it.

“Then I would like to say nothing at all.” I make a show of clamping my lips shut, a tight, bloodless line.

“Your silence will likely be seen by the tribunal as an indication of guilt.”

“Guilt of what? Am I being charged with a crime?”

She runs through the charges and evidence. Felony possession, distribution, concoction. The legal code actually uses the word ‘concoction,’ like I’m a witch at a cauldron. They’ve got eyewitness testimony from a snoopy midshipman, Trembo residue all over my cabin and personal effects, and some minor paraphernalia like the droppers we use for application.

It takes me a while into Moore’s spiel to piece together how things went south for me. Captain Treba is both a hardass and a traditionalist, and somewhere in the discontinued book of regulations that he studied decades ago is a recommendation for cross-departmental systems inspections on the eve of a combat jump; alas, this is my first. So, when the missing Cassurus from my impromptu sabotage spiked the system, the inspector who the bridge assigned to on-site checks of the Cassurus reaction rods wasn’t friendly Colby or Vin or even me, but a priggish ensign I’ve never even met who was eager to raise a red flag to the brass.

Bad luck, that’s all, from a bygone age of paranoia. It’s like they repeat ad nauseam at the academy: No plan survives contact with the enemy. I hope the good people of Dev Keshav appreciate the effort.

“…recommended sentence will be death by evacuation,” Moore finishes, and I blink stupidly at her. “Drug pushing is one thing,” she explains, “but using a warship’s reactor mass to do so could be considered treason.”

It’s a challenge to keep my breathing even. “I don’t think it usually is.”

“Captain Treba sees the value in making an example, especially while under active combat orders.”

Prison I can handle; execution is a factor I hadn’t considered. Maybe this whole side hustle was a bad idea after all.

The good news only cuts through my flop sweat after several more minutes of Moore grilling me, her flinty black eyes growing squintier and squintier.

They don’t have a case.

I’m hardly a legal expert, but as I weather the interrogation, desperately trying to not imagine the infinite vacuum sucking the life out of me, I begin to suspect that Moore is only sitting across the shiny titanium table from me because she needs me to confess. She’s sweating me because they don’t have the evidence to convict. Sure, they’ve probably got enough for a misdemeanor possession charge, but that won’t discharge me from the Service, let alone send the anti-drug message to the crew that squares like her are always after.

As long as I don’t give the game away, I’ll come out of this with little more than extra PT duty and a mark on my record that expires with two years of zero citations. I can handle that.

There’s just one problem: I’ve been in this chair for six hours. Five hours duty time, two hours in Circle… That means my Trembo titration has been on heat for a little more than thirteen hours. Less than a day left until it’s ready to cool and season. Much more than that and we start running the risk of miasma.

At a concentration of 2 parts-per million, the gas released by overcooked Trembo causes nausea and fatigue. At 5 ppm, uncontrollable rage and/or despair. At 8 ppm, it induces powerful, disturbing hallucinations, personality dissociation, chronic insomnia, and tumors on the eyes and eardrums. The amount of Trembo I have cooking in my cabin right now could easily fill the ship with at least that concentration. Not quite enough to kill the crew of the Ludwig Quidde, but enough to send us back to dry dock for months so we can seek intensive psychiatric and medical treatment for everyone on board.

What’s the next line of that cadence about the shark? Hard to think at the moment, you’ll have to excuse me.

I mentally map out the ship. As an engineer I know exactly how many air processors are between the brig and the toxic brew hidden inside the engineering access shafts. It’s a high count. I’ll likely get no worse than a headache, probably the least affected among the crew. They likely won’t even find the source before the evidence against me has evaporated away. Then again, psychotic miasma is something to be avoided on its own demerits.

Moore excuses herself and leaves me to stew in my own thoughts. It’s the oldest interrogation trick in the world, but what really rankles me is that it’s working. Moore doesn’t know it, but I actually am on a clock. I count the minutes as they pass, as if I can feel the heat increasing in my containment unit from all this distance away. Cassurus and silicon and bismuth and a few little tricks, so useful and beautiful and about to turn very nasty.

My attempts at sleeping are a joke. Behind my eyelids I can see what will happen. Fights on the bridge between fellow officers. Punches thrown, sidearms pulled, shots fired. Manic orgies ending in blood. Hysterical monsters that used to be my crewmates cackling over the crowd-suppression sonics, biting and clawing and humping, leaping out of airlocks, ripping cables from consoles with prankster glee as their lungs fill with the darker half of my beautiful product.

Nine hours left.

The only card I have left to play is Lars. The moment he finds out I’ve been arrested, he’ll head to my secret cooking corner and power down the Trembo titration, just like we always talked about. I would never work with such dangerous substances without a backup, and Lars is as conscientious as they come. He’ll save us. He’ll save me.

Ah, I remember the line. …The point man laughed as he drew his knife… I hated boot camp. It was a means to an end, a way to find stability, to see the galaxy, to meet new and interesting people. To get away from my family and start fresh, untainted by their disdain. To get a subsidy so I could afford to set up on one of the colonies and make my own way there, a big fish in a small pond, no sharks required.

There’s a commotion outside my cell. I get on my tiptoes to see through the slit window in the door. Anna is in the hall arguing with someone I can’t see. The door muffles her words, but what I can see sends chills down my spine: The light on her earpiece burns yellow.

Captain Treba has ordered the crew to Readiness Level 3, which among other things mandates sequestration for Intelligence and Navigation officers, as well as the ship’s complement of marines. Rather than having the run of the ship like normal, Lars will be isolated in his operations pod for the foreseeable future. It’s possible that he doesn’t even know I’m locked up. My only trusted help is separated from me by a gulf of orders and protocol, which means the danger is unattended.

I bang on the door and yell for Anna. She glances at my door but makes no move to help. “It’s going to go bad!” I shriek. She turns and leaves the brig, every movement crisp.

Two more hours. How could I have been so stupid? Two heads are better than one, but still so vulnerable. Could I have enlisted other help along the way? What would they have said if I asked, all those supposed friends of mine? My loyal customers, sliding over their hard-earned wages for a little escapism, a few good laughs, a meaty hunk of catharsis. Would Harriet or Ogden or Victoria step up to shield me from the law, or shake their heads and flee from the skeevy drug pusher in their midst? Just how my parents saw me, an inescapable inconvenience, an embarrassing testament to a pleasurable mistake.

In my mind’s eye the crew is screeching like bats disturbed in their cave, swirling and biting and wailing, blood under their nails and in their furious eyes. Those who get the worst of the miasma might be better off than their mystified, barricaded colleagues; at least the worst of the crazies won’t feel so betrayed at the end.

Another hour passes. Maybe I won’t even need Lars. Maybe they’ll let me go and I can get back to my cabin and shut down the reaction and everything will be fine. I’ve been pacing all day in this tiny cage; my whole body is screaming.

…He said, hey there, Sharkey, you must be tired of life.

Seventeen hours. If Lars could have saved my bacon, he would have done it by now, and he would have found a way to let me know, even if that meant walking by my cell window with a casual thumbs-up. They’ve finally sweated me enough. I call for Moore. I take one more stab at getting myself released, but she’s not having it. She can smell the desperation on me. I’m an engineer, not a card player; concealing my emotions isn’t a strong suit.

Well, all right, here’s your evidence. I tell her where to find the filter, how to get into that exact part of the bulkhead, how to disable the reaction before it goes critical. “And hurry. Time is a factor.”

She rushes out—good, not too cool to take me seriously—leaving me to sulk in the knowledge that the ship will be safe, even if I just put the bullets in the rifles of my own firing squad.

There’s a slight change in timbre from the reactor, four decks and forty-three bulkheads away. I know that sound; it’s my sound, the sound of a Cassurus reaction building a displacement shield. The ship is preparing for an intersystem jump. Dev Keshav, under the knife. But then the sound dies, the ship stays in real space, and I half-smile in the knowledge that at least the plan worked; I’ve bought those poor colonists some time.

I shout through the door at the MP lurking outside. It’s Petra; we’ve Circled together three times. As a child, all she wanted in the world was to help lions and tigers and leopards, a ranger or a veterinarian. She didn’t have connections and couldn’t afford the schooling, not without veteran assistance. That pain sits like an oil slick on top of my own, along with her hope for a better future.

I ask her for help. For news. For a kind word. She doesn’t say anything. Nor do any of the other crew members passing by the tiny window. Why would they, I just work here.

Good for them. The last thing my friends need is to be roped into this nonsense. I stole the reactor material, I rejected orders, I cooked the drug, I started our whole little psychedelic cult. It’s on me, a martyr to the family business.

Sorry, Gramps. Sincerely.

I sleep, I wake, I sleep again. My neck stiffens up on the right side, an old weightlifting injury that flares up at times like this. I wonder how many of my crewmates have felt that pain while they sat across from me in Circle, as if it was their own wound. Did I ever bring anything truly good to them?

The door ca-chunks, and the lock indicator switches from red to green. I shoot to my feet; I may be a criminal, but I can face my accusers like a sailor.

It’s Petra. She cradles a pulse rifle in her arms, huge and sleek and deadly. I scramble against the back wall in panic. Nowhere to run.

She raises a calming hand. “Aldin. It’s all right.”

She beckons me out into the hall. Like a skittish cat being rescued from a tree, I slowly follow her. The ‘Occupied’ light burns on every single other brig cell. “I hope you weren’t too comfortable in there. We need the space.”

The passage is empty. Petra follows me, head on a swivel but a smirk on her face. I turn to her. “What’s going on? Am I…” I don’t want to say the word reprieved; that would be ridiculous. They probably need the extra hands.

She bites her lip. “I wouldn’t want to spoil it.”

Just then, the intercom crackles to life. “Lieutenant Commander Anker, please report to the bridge.” It’s impossible to tell the voice through the mic distortion.

It’s only a couple minutes’ walk to the bridge, buried at the midline of the ship. Petra stands back so I can palm the door plate, as if it’ll respond to a disgraced officer’s touch.

The door retracts in an eyeblink, and I’m instantly bombarded by applause.

I cringe in shock but manage to step forward a moment later. The room is packed with crew, all of whom I know in the Circle way. Most of them aren’t even assigned to the bridge. They’re all standing and clapping for my entrance, like I’m a politician entering the floor of Parliament after a victory.

Executive Officer DeVry waves everyone down. “All right, all right… Back to work, we’re not out of this yet.” The cheery crew turns back to their stations as Anna puts her hand on my shoulder. “What, you didn’t think we’d just abandon you?”

She sits me down and I listen to her account in stunned silence. How the crew saw my titration being dismantled. How friendly MPs spread news of my arrest and charges. How my friends heard about the sacrifice I made, giving myself up to make sure that the crew stayed sane.

“Still, mutiny? For me?”

“For all of us. None of us have a taste for war anymore, not since we sampled the good stuff; you can see why a warring empire needs to make your product illegal. Just because the Dynasty wants secession quelled by any methods doesn’t mean we have to go along with it.” She gestures to the captain’s chair, conspicuously empty. “We’ll drop the loyalist crew in a lifeboat in striking range of a base, and then we’re on our own.”

My engineer’s mind finally grasps the reality of what we’re talking about. “We have a colonial battlecruiser. Even without the guns, that’s mobility and energy and security for… however long we want.” Designer specs say an RK-T1 reactor core can function for over six hundred years with minimal field maintenance. I’ve never heard of one failing. Colby even replaced my stolen Cassurus mass, so the reactor didn’t have to work overtime to replace it.

“We have a battlecruiser,” she confirms. “Although I could do without the ‘battle’ part.”

I cock my head. “Did you pull that line from my head, or did I take it from you?”

Anna takes the captain’s chair, shaking her head. “When I was a kid, I always wanted to be in command of something. In control. It seems so childish now.”

“All I wanted was to know someone cared about me.”

She squints at me, silent laughter in her cheeks. “How’d that work out for you?”

The ship’s humming engines whoosh into silence, and I get the pleasant floating feeling of slipping into D-space. We’re on our way. To what, I can’t be sure, but I’m going there with friends. With family. After all, mine is a family business, and it brought me this far. No sharks, no grime, no knife. Just a Service of infinite exploration.

Thanks, Gramps. Sincerely.

Anna’s eyes sparkle. “Join the Navy, they said.”

I smile. “See the galaxy, they said.”

END