Federation Year 337

“They say the war is starting to turn.”

Jessok lifted his head from the bed with a slightly exaggerated groan.

“Oh, do they?” he said. “Those mysterious they I keep hearing about? At this point in my life I keep picturing a secretive cabal, meeting on some secret space station on an unregistered lane...”

“Jessok…”

“... conspiring towards some grand plan of information control.”

“Jessok, you know what I mean!” his bunkmate said with semi-amused exasperation.

“Yes, Bern. I know what you mean.”

He rubbed his face and glanced at the timer on the wall. His shift had ended exactly nine minutes ago, and most of that time had gone into getting back here.

“Well?” Bern said.

“Well what?”

“Well what do you think, you obstinate ass?”

Jessok looked up at the bottom of the top bunk.

“Well…”

He rubbed his face a little more

“Well, the mysterious cabal known only as ‘they’...” Jessok started.

“Will you stop that?!”

“... has it that we’ve been scoring victories in some important theatres lately. It’s a fact that we’ve been getting an influx of fresh ships… Yeah, we could be turning things around.”

He smiled a little at himself.

“Well, I say ‘we’... I’m a minor tech, and so are you.”

“Hey, it all adds up,” Bern replied. “No one’s out there personally punching ships out of orbit.”

“Are you sure? Because supposedly at Mennan...”

“I thought you didn’t go for rumours,” Bern said pointedly.

“Eh. I go for whatever makes a conversation more interesting.”

“I think you mean frustrating,” his bunkmate said.

“Oh, I’m not frustrated.”

“I know you’re not.”

With another groan Jessok swung his legs out of the bunk and stood up.

“I’m also not quite tired enough to fall asleep just yet. Will you join me?”

“My shift is still an hour off. Do you have any particular plans?”

“No,” Jessok said. “Just going to stroll around a bit, and… ah,” Some emotion he couldn’t immediately identify struck out of the black, “I guess I’m going to take a look downwards.”

“Sure.” Bern swung his own feet out of the bunk. “I’ll join you.”

Jessok spent a few moments adjusting his jumpsuit, and Bern did the same. Some of the officers were really anal about neatness, off-duty or not. His eyes wandered around the room that had been his home for five months now. It was a short trip. The only features besides the bunk bed itself were two modest containers for their personal belongings, a collapsible toilet/sink setup, and the weapon locker.

Overall the place’s only saving grace was only having to share it with a single person. He was so heartily sick of this cramped, dull little room. But the alternative to dullness was… well…

He touched the weapon locker. The frame around it glowed red, signalling that it was indeed firmly locked. It would only open with an electronic command from the bridge, or a verbal one from an officer.

“You don’t want that thing to open, do you?” Bern asked him, sounding a little bit concerned.

“No, no,” Jessok assured him. “I’m happy to leave that stuff to the combat troops. Just letting my mind wander.”

The door parted in two directions as they stepped up to it. The hallway was much like the room: Achingly utilitarian; all grey metal and red-brown wiring covers. Even the carpeting that showed which part of the ship they were on happened to be a plain brown for this area.

The only variety was the people; mostly general ship-hands and Jessok’s fellow techs. Keeping alive a ship that had been bought used and renovated on top of old renovations was a never-ending job. But this just was the kind of warship one was likely to serve on in the Nearer Fringe.

The corridor ended in a wide doorway, marked Bunk Area 4, and beyond was a hard point, set up by one of the stairways leading up onto the bridge deck. Combat soldiers stood about, fully armed and armoured. They were just professional enough to try to hide their boredom, but not enough to do it well, even though their faces weren’t visible. A ship like the Brankon simply wasn’t boarded without ample warning.

The ID’s attached to their jumpsuits kept the alarms silent, and, moreover, the soldiers recognised the two of them, so they passed by the guard station with a casual wave.

Jessok felt a sudden thirst for windows, surprising him with its intensity. After two months without going planetside it was like his body suddenly needed a reminder that the universe was bigger than this, that it wasn’t all corridors and engine rooms that only barely factored in the human body. But a window on an armoured warship was a bit of a logical contradiction. The rec room featured an alternative, and so, moved by this sudden thirst, Jessok sped up his steps as he saw the familiar wide door.

It was barely in use. Two people sat opposite one another over in a corner, isolated enough to hint at something private going on. Three tired-looking ship-hands were playing a subdued game of Ganga and didn’t look up as the two of them entered. And a human silhouette was faintly visible through the sheet of a simple VR booth. That was it.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Jessok opted to leave everyone to their own business and simply walked straight for the observation setup. There were a lot of exterior cameras on a ship the size of the Brankon, only a few of which were available to everyone. But he was happy with just accessing the main underside one. It was all he needed to take in the planet down below.

Yvenna was a neat little world. It wasn’t a power in its own right, but was far more developed than many other Nearer Fringe planets. And despite a lot of urban development Yvenna’s single continent retained a lot of lush green, clearly visible through the clouds even without the zoom function. Both of these probably had to do with the world never suffering the kind of cataclysmic bombing that had left so many Fringe planets harsh and desperate.

“It’s pretty,” Bern commented as he started working the zoom function.

“Yes,” Jessok agreed. “Regardless of zoom level, do you notice that?”

“They each have their appeal,” Bern replied. They started to make out the general shape of urban areas, lakes and waterways, and high-flying aircraft. “The hazy whole, and the details themselves.”

The camera could narrowly make out the main reason they were even here: Yvenna’s impressively large docking yards. Large enough to recharge an entire battle fleet, given a little bit of patience. The Brankon was here to make sure it would be one of their fleets.

“I’m not going to lie,” Jessok said. “This is giving me ground-feet.”

“Yes,” his bunkmate replied. “Have you ever served on a ship with a garden-room?”

“No. Though I did work on a station with one. It even had a small colony of birds.”

“Ah, birds,” Bern said wistfully. “It’s funny, the things you start to miss after a while.”

“When I get groundside,” Jessok said, halfway lost in the landscapes down below, “I am going to run. Just run, in a straight line, without having to make turns or worry about smashing into people.”

“I’m going to get drunk,” Bern said with a grin.

“Drinking is best after a bit of exertion.”

Maybe this had been a mistake. Because the thirst was only getting worse. And barring some big change, there would be no going down to this particular planet. Their stay here wasn’t quite an occupation and not quite at the behest of the local government. The polite phrase, being used by officers and the government, was protection. The Ulaka Authority was having to defend itself on multiple fronts these days. With a bit of luck they wouldn’t be able to spare anything that could reliably take on the Brankon, and Yvenna would emerge from the whole war untouched. And a major part of keeping things civil was a rule of no crewmembers planetside.

Jessok tore himself away from the feed, without any lingering looks. Best to treat it like pulling a piece of wire out of one’s hand, and get it over with quickly and cleanly. Bern kept on messing with the zoom, while Jessok plopped himself down on a nearby chair and opened a screen on the wall. He flipped through the various categories of available recordings, and some perverse impulse made him pick the war effort itself.

The footage was, of course, cherry-picked. And rather skilfully too, so it wasn’t like Jessok could point to any obvious holes in the narrative. But obviously the Alliance leadership wasn’t going to advertise failures. That was just how things worked. At the same time, Jessok found that he couldn’t bring himself to call it propaganda. Not when it simply was the truth, as described to him by everyone who’d been to the actual hot spots.

The Ulaka Authority was brutal. Residential areas bombed, prisoners executed en masse, unrest in newly conquered areas suppressed with cruel dispersal tactics, and sometimes simply with live fire. People gave personal accounts, sometimes with numbness and sometimes with hysterical grief or rage, but always with an air of simple sincerity.

The footage came from body cams worn by combat troops, from local news agencies, security cameras, or from recordings done by the Authority soldiers themselves. Some of it was smuggled out of held territories to let the wider galaxy know what was being done, some was found after Alliance victories, and some of it was a mystery. And since footage could travel no faster than the spaceships who transported it, it couldn’t provide an up-to-date account of the war. But it sure made it clear what kind of war this was.

“This is the recreation room,” Bern said, glancing his way, “not the depression room.”

“Well, this is the future of the Nearer Fringe, if those bastards get their way,” Jessok replied, hating the melancholic tone in his voice but unable to resist it.

“Yes. But they,” Bern shut off the camera feed, “those mysterious they, have it there’s a big reckoning coming.”

“The pieces are moving, sure, sure,” Jessok replied, and glanced at the game of Ganga.

“You do remember what’s in one direction away from here, and what’s in the other, right?” Bern said.

“I remember, I remember,” Jessok told him, and left it at that. The officers didn’t like talk of fleet movements, or plans. Not even shipside. Not even when it was just speculation based on common knowledge.

He started walking again, and Bern stayed with him. Unfortunately, so did the mood that had suddenly hit.

“When we…”

He fell silent and let his brain catch up with his mouth as they strode down one of the main corridors.

“What?”

“When we look back on all this, these times, and all the shit that came with them… do you think we-”

There was still a bit of catching up to do, and they continued on down the hallway. Jessok stopped for a second and looked up into the pipes and grates. A quirk of the ventilation system had allowed conversation on the bridge to carry faintly down to this spot, making it a popular spot for a bit of pointless, naughty eavesdropping, until the officers had caught on. Now an excess air conditioner had been put up there, drowning anything else out.

He finished his stroll down the hallway, walked through a doorway, and onto a narrow grating over a water treatment area.

“Do you… look, everyone knows by now what this war is about. Where the Authority is trying to take us all. And if they fail, then in the decades to come everyone will remember how bad things looked. Do you think it’s egotistical to hope that… our being here will matter, in some small way?”

“Weren’t we just discussing this earlier?” Bern asked.

“I mean being here, specifically,” Jessok told him. “A part of me is hoping that those docking yards will end up mattering in this war, simply because I’m here. So that in future I can bring up this posting as a matter of pride. Even if I’m just a tech, I will have been a small part of history.”

Jessok leaned forward on the railing and Bern joined him.

“Are you having one of those attacks of piety?” the man asked.

Jessok chuckled at his own expense.

“Maybe. Being raised as a faithful… you can walk away from it, but not from the grooves it forms in your personality.”

“You mean, making you ashamed of your own humanity?” Bern asked pointedly.

“That’s a bit of an oversimplification.”

“Is it? Look, everyone has an ego, even if the size and comfort of it varies.”

Bern looked down into the water treatment room, at their fellow low-rung drones on this great, big ship in this great, big war.

“It’s only natural to want to matter. And I think the desire takes on a different air in the face of… enormous forces. But like I said, it’s never up to one person. Mankind is a unity.”

There were too many religions floating around to keep track of, but Jessok faintly recalled Bern being brought up around one that had that concept at its core. He thought about asking, but decided against it.

“People only fully know themselves,” Bern went on. “So when confronted with the really big things, it’s easy to fall into feeling like it’s all resting on one’s own shoulders. That’s when man feels small and broken down, and hopeless. In the face of-”

“This got real philosophical real fast!” Jessok said, and didn’t quite know why he ended it on a chuckle.

“Not interesting enough for you?” Bren replied.

“No, no. I didn’t say that. I just-”

The alarm hit his eardrums, and went straight from there to his glands, flooding his system with adrenaline before he could even make conscious connections.

It was the boarding alarm. The Brankon was being boarded, with no warning.