Lacuna: The Ashes of Humanity (12 page)

But instead, she turned her back and left without saying a word.

The Broadsword fell into the atmosphere, flames licking up the sides of the tiny viewing portals as it descended. The speed was not strictly necessary. The reactionless drives could lower them through the atmosphere slow enough to avoid a heated re-entry, which was the protocol for damaged craft, but this way was much faster.

Liao, stuck with her thoughts once again, certainly appreciated their alacrity.

The moment the ship's loading ramp dropped into the dirt, she walked down it. The area had been mud only hours before, but the heat and sun had dried it back to dirt. She knew better than to be fooled, though. The sooner they established an all-weather landing pad, the better.

She walked back to Operations, touching her new radio as she did.

"Liao to Operations."

"Lieutenant Yung here. Welcome back, Captain."

"Thank you, Lieutenant. I'm on my way back to Operations."

"How was your mission?"

"Successful," Liao said, moving into the hangar bay. "The trade was made, and the crew of our missing ship—along with the ship itself—were returned. I also managed to pick us up something that might help us in the coming days. I was going to write a full report about it, if Commander Iraj is happy to hold down Operations for a while longer."

"Commander Iraj is off duty, Captain. The 1800 shift began two hours ago."

Liao shook her head as she made her way through the bustling corridor. "Who authorised the shift change?"

The officer on the other end hesitated as though she was testing him. "Captain, it's 2004 hours."

She stopped, squinting as she looked at her watch.

She'd been awake for nearly thirty-six hours. With limited sleep before that.

"Understood," she said. "Disregard that question. Thank you, Lieutenant."

She closed the line and changed course back towards her quarters. Upon arriving, she closed the door, the thick metal seeming heavier than it usually did, then tried to sleep.

Liao tried everything. Singing an old Chinese lullaby. Counting sheep. Lying there with her eyes closed, occasionally turning over and over in her bed. Nothing.

Eventually she dragged herself back to her feet, showered, dressed again and then sat down at her desk. If she was going to be awake, she might as well use that time productively. She pulled out her tablet, plugged in a keyboard and then began to type.

The words blurred together as she wrote. She described visiting the Iilan ship, the trade, along with the return of their crew. They appeared well fed and healthy, although how exactly they'd eaten or hydrated inside a liquid environment remained a question to be answered in the debriefing. It was long, longer than it needed to be, and full of unnecessary detail. It was difficult to be concise in her current state; she didn't know what to keep or what to remove, so kept it all.

Right as she finished, the buzzer to her quarters rang.

"Come in," she said, folding down her laptop screen.

She expected James, but Rowe pushed open the door.

"Ho—lee—shit." Rowe waved around a clipboard energetically. "Captain, those things are amazing!"

"Do you have to swear so much?"

"I like my coffee with two sugars and my swearing bellicose."

"Fair enough." Liao folded her arms on her desk. "So. What things?"

"The digger whatsits. Those things the Iilan gave us. I unpacked them and decided to give them a bit of a spin. You just ask them for what you want, and they dig it straight out of the ground. They're like beetles the size of a dog, and get this: they poop what they're mining." She squealed in a manner Liao found grating. "They literally, like, shit out blocks of whatever you want. They do it for the dross, too. Like, brown slabs of various minerals, all mixed in together. You can
even
get them to separate them out, but I haven't done that yet, since what we really need is just bricks right now. Later, we could use this thing to mine basically whatever we want. Of course, we can't do much with it yet, but if we had those constructs from the
Rubens
doing construction, we could build fairly complicated things. Houses. Aircraft. Fuck, even new Broadswords!"

Liao wanted to be pleased, but all that was there was a vague sense of emptiness. "Good. Is there anything else?"

"Yeah," said Rowe. "That Lucifer's Gas. We have about ten litres of it, but to be honest, I'd rather allocate the resources to these builders."

"Fine. Ten litres should be enough. I'll let you know if we need it." Liao couldn't focus. "Anything else?"

"Yeah. I wanna know what to build first."

"Ask Cheung. I imagine shelters outside the
Beijing
will be a priority for now. Or water pumps. Or sewage systems."

"Yeah. First things first, hey? Gotta start small before we build more ships."

"That's good thinking."

Rowe's red hair bounced all around her head. "Until then, though, there's a lot we can do with those raw materials. We can start building some permanent structures in this place."

"Well, perhaps we should wait until we've received confirmation from the Telvan that we can stay here." Liao considered. "But I guess there's no harm in gathering some resources while we wait."

That answer seemed to appease her. "Sounds good." Rowe smiled. "I feel like I wished on a star and got what I wanted. Christmas has come all at once for me. Santa
is
real, he is. Except that the North Pole has been baked to a crisp by now, of course. All those poor little elves. Rudolph won't be pulling a fucking sleigh this year."

"Thank you, Summer, for that amazingly depressing thought."

"No worries, Captain!"

Rowe closed the door, but no sooner had metal hit metal than it opened again.

"Captain," said Commander Iraj, a gentle smile on his face. "I was hoping to talk to you for a moment."

Liao wanted to be alone right now, but a solitary existence was not one for naval captains. "Sure. What's on your mind, Kamal?"

He indicated a computer printout. "The crew of the
Tehran
. They sent through another update."

She tried to keep herself as professional as possible. "What's the word?"

"Lots of things, most of it irrelevant. There's a lot of grief about the destruction of Earth. The Telvan send their deepest sympathies and will send aid as soon as some becomes available. Further, they've given us permission to settle on Velsharn for as long as we feel safe, indefinitely if need be."

The trend of everyone else sorting out their problems continued unabated. "I had hoped to see them personally about this, but it's good that Commander Sabeen's handling it."

"She's a skilled diplomat," said Iraj, "and she's passionate about what she does. They're still searching for Nalu." His voice lowered slightly. "It doesn't look good, I'm going to be honest. But the scene on the ground there is chaotic. There are so many people, Toralii and Human, who are lost. Scattered."

Liao nodded mutely.

"There's one more thing," said Iraj. "The Telvan want to resettle the Belthas IV refugees here on Velsharn."

That was an interesting suggestion. Liao mulled it over. "Going to be honest," she said, "it sounds like a brilliant idea for us. It would mean more direct Telvan help, especially with our infrastructure and defence. The Telvan might not be willing to take on the Alliance over some Humans, but they'll be much more likely to act if the lives of their own citizens are at stake."

"It would mean a much closer alliance to them, but I think it's a good idea too. Shall I send through the word with the next Broadsword?"

"Please do," she said.

"Anything else?"

Liao shook her head. "Seems like everything's coming together well."

"That it is." Iraj opened the door to her quarters. "A recommendation, Captain? Get some sleep."

"That's the plan," she said. "Soon enough."

"Now isn't soon enough. You're looking fatigued."

She made a shooing motion. "Soon as you let me go, it's nap time."

"Good. See you in the morning."

The door almost,
almost
closed, and then it swung open again. She heard Iraj protest, but then James stepped through the door, and everything got a little better.

"Hey," she said, not realising until that moment just how much she wanted to see him.

"Hey." He smiled. "Heard the news?"

"Yes, Kamal just told me. This place might be getting a whole lot more crowded."

"It's a good thing. We could really use the help."

Help, or more drain on their already limited resources? She disliked the idea of relying on the Telvan, but their presence would make a big difference to them. "I thought the same thing." She opened the cupboard above her desk and pulled out a bottle of scotch. "Drink?"

"I didn't realise you kept this stuff in your quarters, too."

"Office, quarters, it's all the same to me." She poured out a full glass for each of them. "You like ice with yours, right?"

"Yeah."

She held out the glass to him, then they toasted.

"To Allison," Liao said, and drank. The alcohol burned as it went down, and the fire was somehow comforting.

James waited until she was done, watching her. "Allison?" He sipped at his drink.

"Yeah." She inhaled, closing her eyes a moment. It was something she'd been meaning to discuss with James since… she barely even remembered. Since before Earth was gone. "I finally thought of the perfect name."

"The perfect… name?"

"For the baby." She drank again. "Allison."

James frowned. "Allison? Really? Oh God, Melissa, no."

She gripped her glass a little tighter. "What's wrong with Allison?"

James, clearly unwilling to argue with her, didn't answer right away. "Uh, nothing
generally
."

"Well, what's wrong with Allison
specifically?
"

"I… used to date a woman called Allison."

"So?"

"She was a hooker."

"A hooker?"

He gave a sheepish smile. "So we didn't really
date
date."

She snorted. "You're an idiot."

"Ah, yeah. My wilder, younger days…" He smiled. "Seriously, though, Allison's fine. It's a lovely name."

"Good, because I've decided."

"Are you sure you should be drinking so much?"

"It's fine."

James seemed to accept that answer. "Well, okay, look. Glad you're feeling better. I was scheduled to return to the
Tehran
with the Broadsword, but it turns out the ship's been delayed because of mechanical trouble. So I have another day here." He sipped some more of his scotch. "We should do something fun."

"A picnic, maybe?"

"Picnic," he said. "Tomorrow evening."

They finished their drinks, and then James went back to his quarters. As he opened the door, and the corridor beyond became visible, Liao ground her teeth together. The marines outside her door were absent. They could not even afford guards on the captain's quarters now? What other parts of her ship were going unwatched?

Then she was alone again. She should try to sleep again—the alcohol would probably help—but instead she sat behind her desk and opened her laptop. She began to write.

She started with a full chronicle of everything she had encountered since leaving Earth. The same information was detailed in meticulous reports to Fleet Command, and there were copies on the
Beijing
's databases so they had survived, but this was different. No sterile recollection of events or formal report; instead Liao wrote whatever was in her head. She wrote what she
really
felt about matters of Ben, the Telvan, and the battle over Belthas IV.

She wrote that she had been wrong to trust the Toralii Alliance.

She wrote that she should not have given Ben control of her ship.

She wrote that she was sorry.

All in all, it took nearly four hours in one continuous stream without pause, except to sip at a glass of water or stretch her wrists. She broke it down into chapters, each chapter dealing with a decision she'd made. She noted what she did wrong, what she would do in that situation knowing what she knew now, and how she could do better.

It was disorganised, chaotic even, but it had everything she knew. All her experience. All her mistakes. Everything.

When she was done, she saved the file and printed out a copy, stapling it neatly and placing it on her desk. She spent a moment staring at the cover.

On Matters of Continuation

By Naval Commander Melissa Liao

March 1st, 2044

She signed the bottom of the document with her fountain pen, then opened the top drawer and placed her pen delicately on its holding forks. She carefully moved it from the heavy wood of her table, using the metal as a paperweight for the thick document. From outside, the low rumbling of a returning ship landing at the colony caused the pen to vibrate ever so slightly.

The messenger Broadsword from the
Tehran
, no doubt, returning with more news. Kamal or Jiang or someone else would handle it. She should feel good, should be relieved that humanity's chances were improved, but she was completely numb to it.