Excelsior (9 page)

“Can I help you, Mr. Ambassador?”

“Your orders are to get to Wonderland with all possible speed, Captain,” the man said, approaching the bar like a snake slithering in for the kill.

“I’m sorry, I don’t believe we’ve met,” Alexander said, holding out a gloved hand.

The ambassador shook hands with him. “Maximilian Carter, Ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to the Alliance.”

“Plenty-potenty-ary… That’s quite a mouthful, Max.” Korbin glanced sharply at him, and Alexander offered a brisk smile to cover his contempt.

“Pleni-potentiary,” Maximilian corrected.

“That’s what I said,” Alexander replied.

“We’re on a strict timeline here, Captain. Now more than ever.”

“A few hours downtime won’t make a lot of difference to our mission parameters, but it will to my crew’s morale.”

Alexander felt someone tap him on the shoulder.

“Here you are, sir.”

He turned to see Lieutenant Stone holding out an acrylic tumbler full of Scotch. He accepted the drink with a nod of thanks and turned back to the ambassador. Alexander sat sipping away under Maximilian’s watchful blue gaze. The man’s wavy blond hair, long, aquiline nose, too-perfect face, and tall, trim figure gave him an aristocratic air. He was probably meant to look erudite and sophisticated to geners, but Alexander thought he looked pompous and disingenuous instead.

“What if the Confederacy follows us to Wonderland?” Maximilian asked.

“That’s a valid question. I have another one. What if a sea monster eats us?”

“Your attitude will be noted in my report.”

“Well, the truth is, Max, I don’t give a flying fuck what you write up in your report. I just lost five family members, and I have a paper-shuffling bureaucrat in my face, trying to tell me not to grieve for them. I’m sure you can understand how that might make me grumpy.”

Maximilian scowled and walked away.

“That’s tellin’ him, sir,” Seth said from behind the bar.

Alexander drained his glass and turned to the bar. “Another, please.”

“Coming right up.”

“You sure have a way with people,” Korbin said, while accepting a beer from Lieutenant Stone.

“I know. Maybe I should go into the foreign service? Become a professional snot like Max.”

Korbin snorted. “You’d start a war.”

Alexander froze in mid-sip of his second drink. Stone winced and Seth spilled a precious ounce of Scotch on the bar counter.

“I’m sorry, Captain, I wasn’t…”

“It’s all right. We had our orders, and the shots we fired didn’t start anything. Those missiles are well on their way to the Oort Cloud by now.”

Korbin nodded and silence stretched between them.

“Well, shit,” Seth said. “Is this a wake or a wallow? I need to get drunk.”

“I’m pretty sure a traditional wake doesn’t involve getting drunk,” Korbin replied.

“I believe in the Irish wake, not the Hispanic one.”

“But you are Hispanic.”

“Jewish Hispanic.”

“Doesn’t Jewish tradition call for designated mourners that don’t shave, shower, or change their clothes for a week? You’re the ones who invented sackcloth.”

“All right that’s enough,” Alexander said. “We’re getting off topic. This is a memorial plain and simple. Grieve or remember however you like, so long it’s in honor of the dead. You get drunk, you pop a pill to get sober, and get back to your stations as soon as the designated four hours are up.”

Korbin nodded. “Sorry. I’m not sure what’s got into me today.”

Alexander studied his XO. He had an idea about what had gotten into her. Same thing that had her practically demanding they turn the ship around and head back to Earth. Her kids. “They’re fine, Commander.”

“How do you know?”

“Because if they aren’t, there’s nothing you can do about it, so worrying is a waste of time.”

“That still doesn’t mean they’re fine.”

“It doesn’t mean they aren’t either.”

“Easy for you to say.”

“Is it? My wife lives in LA. Out of the top ten cities to target with nukes, LA is number two.”

Korbin took a deep breath and let it out again. “I guess we’ll find out when we make contact with Earth again.”

Alexander nodded agreeably. “Right.” What he really meant was, not likely. Fleet Command wasn’t going to tell them how bad things were on Earth, or even allow two-way contact with their families—not unless nothing actually happened back on Earth. It would be too bad for morale if half the crew suddenly realized their loved ones were dead.

Hell, they pulled a third of the crew and called up the mission reserves instead just to make sure that everyone would have plenty of reasons to go back home. With a sigh Alexander put it out of his mind and turned to Lieutenant Stone.

“Everyone has a drink?”

“Everyone who wanted one.”

“Good.” Swiveling to face the rest of the room, Alexander knocked his knuckles on the bar behind him and whistled for attention. Heads turned. Eyes blinked, most of them red with grief. There were more than a few tear-streaked faces in the room.

“Listen up! Tonight we’re mourning exactly five people. As far as we’re concerned, everyone else is still alive. For those of you who are new here, the deceased are: Junior Lieutenant Sara Martinez, Lieutenant Diana Rojas de Chacon, Lieutenant Eduardo Ortiz, Lieutenant Erika Fabrega, and Junior Lieutenant Angel Montero.” Alexander raised his glass. “To their safe passage from this world to the next. May their sacrifice not have been in vain. Salud!”

“Salud!” the crew echoed back.

Alexander threw back the dregs of Scotch in his tumbler.

“Cheers,” someone said quietly beside him.

Alexander turned and saw that it was McAdams. She downed a martini in one gulp and turned to get another from Lieutenant Stone.

Alexander nodded to her. “Where are you from?” he asked.

“Down South, same as you.”

“Then you’d have said salud, not cheers.”

“Not if my family is originally from up North.”

“Your parents emigrated?”

“Grandparents.”

“Walking up stream. I like it. Probably a smart move considering the war. They were rich geners I’m guessing.”

“Geners, yes, rich no,” McAdams replied as Stone passed her another martini.

“Then how come you’re… you are a gener, right?”

“Yes. My grandparents moved down South to invest and live off their investments. Competition in the North is too fierce, and everything’s too expensive. But things didn’t work out and they became casualties of the crime rate. My dad was sixteen and had to fend for himself so he dropped school. He met my mom, they got married, and ended up working seventy hours a week to pay for me to be born a gener.”

“So you joined the service to save your parents?”

McAdams nodded.

“Admirable.”

She winced and looked down at her feet. “It was.”

“Was? You got them moved up North in exchange for service to your country. That’s doubly self-sacrificing. Downright noble.”

When McAdams looked up from her feet, there were tears in her eyes. “I killed them, Captain.”

Alexander shook his head. “They’re not dead, Lieutenant. Ever heard of Schroedinger’s cat?”

She shook her head.

“Ask Davorian sometime. The point is, you don’t know that they’re dead.”

“I don’t know that they’re alive, either.”

“But both are possibilities as far as we know right now, so which would you rather believe—the negative outcome or the positive one? Let me rephrase that: which outcome would you rather be true?”

“The positive one, of course.”

“Then focus on that.”

McAdams frowned and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Call me Alex. You have a first name, McAdams?”

“Viviana,” she said, flashing a brief smile and brushing a lock of blond hair out of her face.

“Nice to meet you, Viviana.”

“Likewise, sir—Alex.”

“Sir Alex. Has a nice ring to it.”

She smiled wryly at that and turned to leave the bar.

He watched her walk away, sipping her martini as she went.

“I thought I was supposed to be the ship’s counselor,” Korbin said. “Or was that just your way of being friendly to the new boot.”

“She’s not technically a boot, but you’re welcome.”

“For?”

“When I send out those briefs, you’re going to have the entire crew come filing through your office, each of them looking for some shred of hope and chipping away at your own reserves with all their doubts. The more hope they have to start with, the easier it’ll be for you.”

Korbin frowned. “What haven’t they told us, Alex?”

He fixed her with a grim look. “Everything.”

Chapter 5

Two hours later Alexander sat in the office attached to his quarters, nursing the after effects of about twenty fingers of Scotch. He tore open a sachet of hydrating vitamins and stirred them into a cup of water. After letting the solution settle for a moment, he used it to wash down an over-the-counter alcohol metabolizer, courtesy of the ship’s doctor. The doc had been passing them around like candy before people had started pairing off to leave the lounge.

Fraternization wasn’t technically against fleet regulations, except between officers and enlisted, but Alexander didn’t believe in playing chaperone for his crew. They were grown-ups, and all was fair in love and war—unless it interfered with the crew’s performance or shipboard duties.

Alexander laid his head back against his chair and closed his eyes for a minute. His head throbbed and spun, and his throat felt cut with grief. Nothing to do about his throat, but his head soon stopped spinning thanks to the metabolizer.

Sobriety made an unwelcome entrance, but she was a necessary muse. It was time to put together the mission brief. Thankfully, someone had thought to leave a locked archive on his computer with all the details of the mission. He used his clearance code to unlock it and then made judicious use of copy-paste to assemble his brief.

Once he was satisfied with his plagiarism, he wrote the summary himself: We’re going to be gone a long time due to time dilation and wormhole geometry. The G-tanks will make our seventy days travel time go by in a blink, but once we get to Wonderland, we’ll be stuck waiting a year or more for a rescue. In a nutshell…

Relativity’s a bitch.

He scratched that last line, but then he imagined the look on Max Carter’s face as he read the brief, and he wrote it back.

We’ll be sending a comm probe to re-establish contact with Earth at 1930 hours, so take a break from whatever you’re doing and record a message for your loved ones back home. Don’t mention any mission specifics unless you want your message censored. Soon as you’re done, forward your messages to Lieutenant Hayes. He’ll have them loaded onto the probe.

When he was finished, Alexander punched the send key on his keyboard, and the brief went out to all of the crew simultaneously. Soon they’d be reading it on their comm bands, assuming they weren’t all too busy fraternizing.

Next order of business was to record a message for his wife.

He turned on the holocomm at his desk and stared into the lens of the camera, wondering what to say. How did he look? Pale? Disheveled? Drunk?

He stopped the recording and ran a hand through his hair to straighten it out. No sense giving his wife the idea that he’d been doing some fraternizing of his own. She knew better, but he’d rather not sow any doubt—especially now that he knew more about Operation Alice. Catalina would have to suffer a lot of silence over the next few years, so this message had to be good if he expected her to wait for him.

Satisfied that his hair probably looked combed, he started recording again.

“Catalina…”

That was as far as he got. What could he possibly say? Desperate for inspiration, he looked around his office. Nothing but gray walls, exposed conduits overhead, and the holoscreen viewport behind him showing a warped version of space.

Then he remembered the pocket watch she’d given him. He felt for it through the thick material of his combat suit. He’d zipped it up in one of the suit’s outer pockets. Now he unzipped the pocket and withdrew the watch to read the inscriptions once more. Time is an illusion. Love is the only truth. Let mine be yours.

Nodding to himself, Alexander looked up once more and started the recording.

“Catalina, by now you know more about what’s happened than I do. I hope to God you’re somewhere safe. As for me, I’m okay. The Lincoln is well on her way to her destination, but there’s a lot they didn’t tell us about this mission. I don’t think I can say much without this message getting edited all to hell before it reaches you, but due to reasons I can’t discuss, I’m not going to be able to keep contact with you. I’ll still record messages every day that I can, but you probably won’t get them for a long time. It’s going to be years before we see each other, Caty—at best. I’ll wait for you, just as I promised, but if you can’t…” Alexander swallowed and managed to smile for the camera. “Above all, I want you to be happy. Whatever that means, I won’t hold it against you, okay? Keep yourself safe. I love you, Caty. Te amo,” he added, repeating himself in their native tongue for emphasis.