The End of All Things: The First Instalment (2 page)

“It wasn’t that bad,” Hart said to me.

“You saw Abumwe’s face while that dude was going on,” Wilson said, to Hart.

“Ocampo,” Hart said, clearly pained that the assistant secretary of state was being referred to as “that dude.” “The number two man in the department. And there was nothing going on with her face,” Hart said.

“She was definitely wearing her ‘please shut the hell up,’ face,” Wilson said, to me. “Trust me, I have seen it many times.”

I looked over to Hart. “It’s true,” he said. “Harry has seen the ambassador’s ‘shut up’ face more than most.”

“Speak of the devil,” Wilson said, and motioned slightly with his head. “Look who’s coming this way.” I glanced over and saw a middle-aged man in a resplendent Colonial Union diplomatic uniform, followed by a young woman, heading our direction.

“The fatuous gasbag?” I asked.

“Secretary
Ocampo,
” Hart said, emphatically.

“Same thing,” Wilson said.

“Gentlemen,” Ocampo said, coming up to us.

“Hello, Secretary Ocampo,” Wilson said, very smoothly, and I thought I saw Hart relax maybe a tiny bit. “What may we do for you, sir?”

“Well, since you’re standing between me and the punch, perhaps you would be so kind as to get me a cup,” he said.

“Let me get that for you,” Hart said, and nearly dropped his own glass in the process.

“Thank you,” Ocampo said. “Schmidt, yes? One of Abumwe’s people.” He then turned to Wilson. “And you are?”

“Lieutenant Harry Wilson.”

“Really,” Ocampo said, and sounded impressed. “You’re the one who saved the daughter of the secretary of state of the United States when Earth Station was destroyed.”

“Danielle Lowen,” Wilson said. “And yes. She’s a diplomat in her own right, of course.”

“Of course,” Ocampo said. “But the fact that she’s Secretary Lowen’s daughter didn’t hurt. It’s one reason why the U.S. is one of the few countries on Earth that will speak to the Colonial Union in any capacity.”

“I’m happy to be useful, sir,” Wilson said. Hart handed him his punch.

“Thank you,” Ocampo said, to Hart, and then turned his attention back to Wilson. “I understand you also skydived from Earth Station all the way down to Earth with Miss Lowen.”

“That’s correct, sir,” Wilson said.

“That must have been some experience.”

“I mostly remember trying not to go ‘splat’ at the end of it.”

“Of course,” Ocampo said. He turned to me next, registering my lack of dress uniform and the crew bag at my feet, and waiting for me to identify myself.

“Rafe Daquin,” I said, taking the hint. “I’m crashing the party, sir.”

“He’s a friend of mine who happened to be on station,” Hart said. “He’s a pilot on a trade ship.”

“Oh,” Ocampo said. “Which one?”

“The
Chandler,
” I said.

“Isn’t that interesting,” Ocampo said. “I’ve booked passage on the
Chandler
.”

“You have?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s been a few years since I’ve taken a vacation and I decided to take a month to hike the Connecticut mountains on Huckleberry. That’s the
Chandler
’s next destination, unless I’m mistaken,” Ocampo said.

“You could just take a department ship, I would think,” I said.

Ocampo smiled. “It would look bad to commandeer a State Department ship as a personal taxi, I’m afraid. As I understand it the
Chandler
lets out a couple of staterooms for passengers. I and Vera here,” he nodded toward his assistant, “have taken them. How are they?”

“The staterooms?” I asked. Ocampo nodded. “I’m not sure.”

“Rafe has just been hired as of about an hour ago,” Hart said. “He hasn’t even been on the ship yet. He’s taking a shuttle over in about an hour.”

“That’s the same shuttle you’ll be on, sir,” Vera said to Ocampo.

“So we’ll experience it for the first time together,” the secretary said, to me.

“I suppose that’s true,” I said. “If you would like I would be happy to escort you and your assistant to the shuttle gate, when you’re ready to depart.”

“Thank you, I’d appreciate that,” Ocampo said. “I’ll have Vera tell you when we’re ready. Until then, gentlemen.” He nodded and wandered off with his punch, Vera following behind.

“Very diplomatic,” Wilson said to me, once he was gone.

“You jumped out of an exploding space station?” I said to him, changing the subject.

“It wasn’t exploding that much when I jumped,” Wilson said.

“And you got out in an escape pod just in time,” I said to Hart. “I’m clearly in the wrong line of space travel for excitement.”

“Trust me,” Wilson said. “You don’t want that much excitement.”

* * *

The
Chandler,
as advertised, was not exciting.

But it’s not supposed to be. I said before that the
Chandler
had blocked out a triangle run. That means that you have three destinations, all of which want something that’s made and exported on the previous planet. So, for example, Huckleberry is a colony that’s largely agrarian—a large percentage of the land mass there is in a temperate zone that’s great for human crops. We take things like wheat, corn, and gaalfruit and a few other crops and take them to Erie. Erie colonists pay a premium for Huckleberry agricultural products, because, I don’t know, I think they think they’re healthier or something. Whatever reason, they want ’em so we take them there. In return we load up on all sorts of rare earth metals, which Erie has lots of.

We take those to Phoenix, which is the center of high-technology manufacturing for the Colonial Union. And from there, we get things like medical scanners and PDAs and everything else it’s cheaper to mass produce and ship than try to put together yourselves in a home printer, and take those to Huckleberry, whose technology manufacturing base is pretty small. Wash, rinse, repeat. As long as you’re working the triangle in the right direction, you’ll get rich.

But it’s not exciting, for whatever definition of “exciting” you want to have. These three colonies are well established and protected; Huckleberry’s the youngest and it’s nearly a century old at this point, and Phoenix is the oldest and best defended of any of the Colonial Union planets. So you’re not exploring new worlds by trading there. You’re unlikely to run into pirates or other bad people. You’re not meeting strange new aliens, or really any aliens at all. You’re shipping food, ore, and gadgets. This isn’t the romance of space. This is you and space in a nice, comfortable rut.

But again, I didn’t give a crap about any of that. I’d seen enough of space and had the occasional bit of excitement; when I was on the
Baikal,
we were pursued for four days by pirates and eventually had to ditch our cargo. They don’t chase you anymore when you do that because then you have nothing they want. Usually. Sometimes when you ditch your cargo they get pissed off and then try to send a missile into your engines to register their displeasure.

So, yeah. As Harry Wilson suggested, excitement can be overrated.

Anyway, right now I didn’t want exciting. What I wanted was to work. If that meant babysitting the
Chandler
’s navigational system while it crunched data for a run that it had done a thousand times before, that was fine by me. At the end of the stint I’d have the blackball off my career. That was also fine by me.

The
Chandler
itself was your basic cargo hauler, which is to say a former Colonial Defense Forces frigate, repurposed for cargo and trade. There were purpose-built cargo haulers, of course, but they were expensive and tended to be built and used by large shipping lines. The
Chandler
was the sole ship owned by its small consortium of owners. They got the obsolete frigate that became the
Chandler
at an auction.

When I did my research of the
Chandler
before the interview (always do your research; I didn’t with the
Lastan Falls
and it cost me), I saw pictures of the frigate at the auction, where it was sold “as-is.” Somewhere along the way it had gotten the living crap beat out of it. But refurbished, it had been doing its run for almost two decades. I figured it wouldn’t accidentally spill me into space.

I took the shuttle ride with Secretary Ocampo and his aide (whose last name I finally learned was Briggs; that came from the crew and passenger manifest, not from the secretary), said good-bye to them at the ship. Then I reported to Han and my immediate boss, First Pilot Clarine Bolduc, and then to Quartermaster Seidel, who assigned me quarters. “You’re in luck,” she said. “You get private quarters. At least until we hit Erie, when we take on some new crew. Then you’ll get two roommates. Enjoy your privacy while you can.”

I went to my quarters and they were the size of a broom closet. Technically you could fit three people in it. But you wouldn’t want to close the door or you’d run out of oxygen. I got to pick my bunk, though, so I had that going for me.

At evening mess Bolduc introduced me around to the other officers and department heads.

“You’re not going to be running any scams in your spare time?” asked Chieko Tellez, who was assistant cargo chief, as I sat down with my tray.

“I did a thorough background check,” Han said, to her. “He’s clean.”

“I’m joking,” Tellez said, to Han. She turned back to me. “You know about the guy you’re replacing, right?”

“I heard a little about it,” I said.

“A shame,” Tellez said. “He was a nice guy.”

“As long as you’re willing to overlook corruption, graft, and bigamy,” Bolduc said.

“He never did any of that to me, and that’s what really counts,” Tellez said, and then glanced over at me, smiling.

“I can’t tell whether you’re joking or not,” I admitted.

“Chieko is never not joking,” Bolduc said. “And now you know.”

“Some of us like a little humor,” Tellez said, to Bolduc.

“Joking is not the same thing as humor,” Bolduc said.

“Hmph,” Tellez said. It didn’t look like she was particularly put out by the comment. I figured she and Bolduc ribbed each other on a frequent basis, which was not a bad thing. Officers who got on okay were a sign of a happy ship.

Tellez turned her attention back to me. “You came over on the shuttle with those State Department mucky-mucks, right?”

“I did,” I said.

“Did they say why they were on the ship?”

“Secretary Ocampo is going on vacation on Huckleberry,” I said. “We’re headed that way so he and his aide rented a couple of spare staterooms.”

“If I were him I would have just taken a department ship,” Bolduc said.

“He said it wouldn’t look very good if he did,” I said.

“I’m sure he’s actually worried about that,” Bolduc said.

“Seidel said that Ocampo told her that he wanted to travel inconspicuously and without having to feel like he was dragging his title around,” Han said.

“Do you believe that?” Bolduc asked. Han shrugged. Bolduc then turned to me. “You talked to him, yeah?”

“Sure,” I said.

“That sound reasonable to you?”

I thought back on what Wilson said about Ocampo being in love with the sound of his own voice, and thought about the shuttle ride, after the polite conversation was over, listening to Ocampo dictating notes to Vera Briggs. “He doesn’t strike me as the kind who prefers to be inconspicuous, no,” I said.

“Maybe he’s just screwing his aide and wants to be inconspicuous about
that,
” Tellez said.

“No, that’s not it,” I said.

“Explain,” Tellez said.

I shrugged. “I didn’t get that vibe from either of them.”

“And how is your vibe sense in general, Daquin?”

“It’s all right.”

“What’s your
vibe
about me?” Tellez asked.

“You have a quirky sense of humor,” I said.

“His vibe sense works just fine,” Bolduc said.

Tellez shot a look at Bolduc, who ignored it. “Why would anyone vacation on Huckleberry anyway?” she said. “We’ve been to Huckleberry. A lot. There’s nothing there worth a vacation.”

“He said he wanted to hike the Connecticut mountains,” I said. “Whatever those are.”

“I hope he packed a jacket,” Han said. “The Connecticuts are a polar range, and it’s winter for Huckleberry’s northern hemisphere.”

“He had several trunks,” I said. “His aide Vera complained that he brought three times the clothing he’d need. There’s probably a jacket or two in there.”

“Let’s hope so,” Han said. “Otherwise, he’s in for a disappointing vacation.”

But as it turned out there was no vacation at all.

* * *

I looked up from my chair and saw Captain Thao and Lee Han looking down at me, Thao with a severely pissed-off look on her face, and my first thought was
, Shit, I don’t even know what I did wrong this time
.

My second thought was to be confused as to why I was seeing her at all. I was third pilot, which meant I got the shifts where the captain was usually not on deck; she was usually sleeping or tending to other ship duties when I was in the pilot’s chair. For the three days I’d been piloting, XO Han sat in the command chair while I sat in mine, and we did a whole lot of nothing—the course from Phoenix Station to our skip point was plotted for us by Phoenix Station and all I had to do was make sure we didn’t drift for one reason or another.

We hadn’t. I could have napped through all of my shifts and it would have had the same effect.

We were twelve hours out from skip. At that time the captain would be in the chair, Bolduc would be piloting with Second Pilot Schreiber assisting, and with any luck I would be asleep in my bunk. Having the captain on deck now meant something was out of whack; that she was standing over my chair said maybe what was out of whack had to do with me. What it was I had no idea. Like I said, we were exactly where we needed to be for the skip. There was literally nothing I could have been doing wrong.

“Yes, ma’am?” I said. When in doubt, be ready to take an order.

Captain Thao held out a memory card. I looked at it, stupidly. “It’s a memory card,” I said.