Chapter 6: The Book of Revelations

Bethany. 3

Oh, Jesus, she needed that. She sighed heavily as the bitter nectar of the gods - otherwise known as coffee - slid down her throat. Day and night were concepts that didn’t really translate well to space travel; mankind had evolved to be reliant on the rising and setting of the sun to govern their sleep cycles. The Pineal gland in the human brain would respond to the lowering light of dusk and release Melatonin - the sleep hormone - into the bloodstream, telling the body that it was time to rest. Well, there was no sun in space, at least not a rising or setting one, and changing the ambient lighting on her ship according to the time of day was not only counter-productive but generally ineffective. The only means of telling the time was by literally looking at a clock.

Over the years, she had fallen into something approaching a thirty-hour day schedule. She would sleep for about ten hours, work for about fifteen, and, dotted throughout the day, would have about five hours to herself. This absolutely didn’t work on most planets, but almost the entirety of Bethany’s life was spent in space, so that didn’t really matter. To be honest, the time on her vambrace didn’t really matter either. It didn’t matter what time it was when she got up, only how much sleep she had gotten before it. The actual time was little more than an indicator of its passage rather than anything to run your life by. Like practically every other starship captain, her clock was set to Imperium standard time, which was Greenwich Mean Time in London, on Earth. The time in one planetary city had no bearing on anything at all outside of that city, but an interstellar bureaucracy had to function on a universal time constant, and GMT was as good a time as any. According to her computer, it was 4:32am in London, and for the first time in a long time, that is exactly what it felt like.

Mornings - the part of the day just after she woke up - sucked, no matter what time of the day that actually happened. It didn’t matter if she had been blessed with a full ten hours of solid sleep or if she had struggled to nod off as she had the night before; a single existential truth of her life was that mornings would be infinitely easier if they happened later in the day. Morning people scared and confused her, and she absolutely refused to trust anyone who could pretend to enjoy feeling like she felt now.

On the other hand, there was coffee.

Dick called her coffee “Jet fuel” due to the apparently insane amounts of caffeine in it, but she was starting to consider upping the dosage anyway. She wasn’t getting the same kick out of it as she used to, and - as she aged in that inevitable way that all people did - she was starting to need that kick more and more often. She sighed again as she gulped down another mouthful of that black boiling liquid. She liked her coffee like she liked her men, she had once joked to Dick. Dick had eyed the milkless black liquid and then arched an eyebrow at her. “Hot and silent,” she had clarified with a grin.

She stretched her body, rolling her shoulders and trying to fight away the last reminders of sleep as she leaned her ass against the edge of the kitchen counter. The Long Haul’s galley wasn’t anything particularly impressive; she was sure that other Captains had more elaborate setups on their own ships, but this suited her fine. She wasn’t much of a cook; toiling for hours over intricately prepared meals was not something she had time for, nor something she particularly enjoyed. Food, to her, was fuel, and cooking it was a chore that needed to be done, no different from purging the air filters or cleaning the bathrooms. Some fuel was nicer than others, but it all did the same job, and all of it ended up in said bathrooms eventually. She didn’t know what the term was for someone who was the opposite of a foodie, but she was sure there was one. Dick was rather insistent that the correct term was ‘philistine’ and had tried to convert her to the dark side of gluttony by preparing meals of truly extravagant quality for her. “Now, can you taste the difference in this?” he would ask, handing her a sample of ... something ... that was apparently cooked slightly differently than the last something he had given her.

“Not really,” was usually her inevitable, honest reply. After a few months, Dick had decided that her taste buds just didn’t work properly and had given up.

The galley was essentially a few kitchen counters, a stove, an oven, and a microwave. Hundreds of years of technical innovation and aside from how those appliances were powered, they had hardly changed since their invention. The coffee machine was the only contraption within it that held any sort of meaning for her, and even then, only in the mornings. The rest of the room contained a small table, a few chairs, a bunch of sofas, and a large holo-screen against one corner, good for watching movies or the odd news bulletin. It was currently off.

That was probably for the best. The promise of war had been the thing that had stopped her from sleeping properly the night before. Not the death, carnage, and destruction; that could usually be avoided, but the things that came with it. Refugees stowing away on her ship could cause damage to internal components, tariffs would inevitably increase to fund the war effort, ships being diverted away from fringe systems would lead to an increase in piracy, plus there was always the chance of one side thinking that she was working for the other and outright impounding her ship ... or worse, blowing it up. But mainly, it was the vast tract of space that would become a no-fly zone. The problems that would cause for anyone trying to make a living were incalculable.

For a moment, she realized how callous and heartless she sounded, saying it like that. It’s not that the destruction of entire fleets and whole colonies - not to mention the horrific numbers of dead that came with them - didn’t play on her mind. They did. She was appalled at the bloodlust and enthusiasm for war being shown by the Imperium News Network, but they seemed like an almost fact of life in the Imperium, whereas the things bothering her would be the things that would plague her own life for the foreseeable future, even if she somehow managed to get through the whole thing unscathed. She could see it happening. The process of demonizing and dehumanizing the rebels had long been underway, but to see those efforts pay off in such an extraordinary fashion in that bar had been ... troubling. With each new news segment on the preparations for war, the INN would run a few pieces about common people supporting the actions of their government. “Oh, yes,” the bleached blonde bimbo on the screen would say, “I totally, like, think the rebels should all be killed. That’s what we do to traitors, right?” and then the smart man in a business suit would be interviewed. “Any form of dissension is damaging to the markets; the outer colonies have never understood that. Now they’ve rebelled against the core worlds and are carrying out cowardly terrorist attacks? That’s too far. They need to be stopped.” There were whole streams of this utter horseshit.

Normally, Bethany would roll her eyes, take it as the propaganda that it clearly was, and get on with her day. But she had been in that bar when the news was announced; she had seen the reactions of the people around her. Those had been ordinary people, not paid props, and they had been baying for blood. That reaction could be scaled up to a truly terrifying level if the response was the same in every bar on every street corner, in every town in the Imperium. So much so that she had to genuinely wonder if the ‘paid props’ were just propaganda tools at all. With such overwhelming support for the war, the government would be free to do just about anything without having to worry about the fickle tide of public opinion. But unlike her, ordinary people had never seen a planet under siege, they had never smelled the dark decay of death, they had never heard the shrill screams of agony and anguish; they had never seen war. She had. It was a long-established fact that the quickest way to end a war was to allow the people to see the reality of it, and the Imperium would spare no expense on keeping the more grisly scenes far away from the viewing public. She was sure there would be a few fluff pieces from a reporter “embedded” with the military, but she doubted the general population would see anything more than what the government wanted them to see. She, on the other hand, got her news from sources much closer to the action because they were usually the ones who paid the most for what she was hauling.

She had never met anyone who outrightly professed to be a rebel, but she had been to the outer colonies a number of times, and she knew that they had genuine reason to be pissed at the Imperium. They weren’t traitors, or terrorists, or monsters; they were just people trying to make their way in life, and yet, if the INN was to be believed, they were all heavily armed, disgruntled psychopaths with nothing better to do than murder peaceful core-world citizens in their beds without a moment’s hesitation.

The worst part about it all was that it was working. She had shut the morning news off halfway through a report on how military recruitment was up five-fold in all sectors; she imagined that was an underestimation. The propaganda ministry would have wanted to shame young men and women for not signing up while not putting them off, thinking that all the spots had already been filled.

There was only so much bullshit you could wade through before it got to be too much.

Who the fuck knew. Maybe she was the only one who could see it; maybe they put something in the water on Imperium worlds to make people more susceptible to that kind of nonsense, or maybe all of it was in her head. Either way, it was not making her sleep - and by extension, her mornings - any easier, and that was damned near unforgivable.

She drained the last of her mug, cast another glance at the silent screen, and headed toward the bridge to check on their progress. It had been a week since they had left Port Collins, and they were making good time through the Hudson expanse. If all went according to plan, they should arrive at the capital in about three more days, easily inside of the fourteen-day window for the bonus payment. She also had a buyer for the Rigellian Rum, too; with all the new ships being pumped out of the Imperium shipyards, anything that could fill in for the remarkably rare Earth Champagne to be used in their christenings was being snapped up at extortionate rates, her rum included.

That brought something of a smile to her face as she navigated her way toward the cockpit. The money she would make off this run could fund the much-needed and long-overdue upgrades to her ship. The Long Haul was a pretty standard medium bulk cargo freighter, and its layout was more or less the same as most others: the cockpit up front, a very small passenger bay just behind that - a fancy way of saying there were some jump seats bolted to the walls just outside the cockpit door, - then the first set of ladders that dropped down to the cargo bay. The next rooms were the airlocks - one on each side - and then the crew cabins, with hers on the left and Dicks on the right. The passageway opened up into the galley and lounge areas after that, before the rest of the upper deck was swallowed up by the engine room. Basically, everything of importance was back there, from the engines and FTL drive to the power core and the shield generators. There were also small indentations at the back of the galley for two more ladders down to the cargo bay. The cargo bay, by comparison, was enormous. It was five times the height of the upper deck and ran the entire length of the Long Haul.

It wasn’t a big ship, but at four hundred meters long, it wasn’t small either. Engineering took up well over half of that upper deck space, though, leaving the remaining habitable area for the crew feeling ... compact. She couldn’t bring herself to call it small; it was homely. What that meant, however, was that you could always tell, just by the noises around the ship, where the other crew members were. In this case, there was only Dick, but Dick was silent. She frowned as she headed past the doors to the crew cabins, only to hear a soft thud from below.

Her eyebrows furrowed a little deeper. Once the cargo was secured in the hold, there was next to no reason for anyone to go down there until approaching the drop-off point. If anything, the yawning, chasmous cargo bays were probably the least hospitable place on the ship, with barely enough lighting to navigate it safely and only enough heat to stop things from freezing, and yet there had been a few times over the past week when she had been laying in bed and could have sworn she heard something moving around down there. At the time, she had shrugged it off as a healthy spacefarer’s imagination, tales from her childhood of space monsters stowing away on unsuspecting haulers, only to feast on the equally unsuspecting crew when they were conveniently furthest from help. She had even chuckled to herself, but - on top of the unexplained noises in the night - this would have been the third time she had caught Dick emerging from the hold, and both previous times had been explained away with a need for cleaning supplies. Dick was a decent shipmate and a hard-working crewman, but he had never struck her as particularly OCD when it came to cleanliness. She’d seen his quarters; his new-found neatness certainly didn’t extend to there.

She spotted him as she walked past the airlocks, the top half of him emerging quickly - and remarkably quietly - through the floor as he climbed the ladder.

When Bethany was a young girl, long before realizing her dreams of piloting her own ship, she had spent the summers visiting her grandmother in the sunswept, overly humid, wide open spaces of rural northern Alabama. She had loved her time there, but the thing she loved above all else was her grandma’s home-baked cookie. Even now, she would swear the long-dead and dearly-missed woman would add a few grams of narcotics into the mix to make them as damned delicious as they were. They were ridiculously good.

So Bethany, being the resourceful and determined girl that she was, would try to steal one from the jar at every opportunity she could.

Occasionally - okay, more occasionally. Almost every time, in fact - her Grandma would catch her in the act. Her hand literally in the cookie jar. How the hell that woman knew and how she managed to step through the kitchen door at exactly the right moment was one of the great mysteries of Bethany’s life. But the look on her face when she was caught, that shock, the surprise, and that shamed expression of guilt ... Was exactly the look that momentarily flashed over Dicks face as he stepped off the ladder, turned toward the galley, and came face to face with his captain.

Bethany looked at him, tilting her head curiously to one side before glancing down the open hatch toward the hold and then back to him. “Need more cleaning supplies, Dick?”

“Sorry, Cap’n, I didn’t see you there,” Dick gave half a smile but conveniently refrained from answering the question. Her arched eyebrow was all it took for her crewmate to understand that it hadn’t been rhetorical. “No, Ma’am, I was putting back the things I took from there the other day. They were stinking out my quarters.”

“Ah,” Bethany nodded. It was feasible; the disinfectant stank to high heaven, but...

“Did you still want me to check the solenoids on the point defense grid?” He interrupted her train of thought.

“Oh, umm, yeah, Better had,” she nodded. “Would rather not find out they’re busted when we need them the most.”

“Yeah, that would be a problem,” Dick chuckled. “A’right, Cap’n. Let me know if you need anything.”

With half a wave, Dick squeezed past her and made his way toward engineering. Bethany turned back to the cockpit and took the last few steps to move inside. Relaxing in her chair, she took a moment to admire the corona of the hyperspace bow wave beyond her window. There was a purple-ish tint to the wave of light that was washing back and over the ship as it powered through the comparative wasteland of the Hudson Expanse, and she took a moment to admire it before her eyes flicked down to the nav-com.

The holo screen was showing their current position relative to the astronomical landmarks around them. They were passing them at truly astonishing speeds, with the more distant stars passing at a slower rate and a green line extending outward from the icon that identified the ship, showing the route they would be taking, along with an estimated time of arrival at their destination. Short of any unexpected delays or diversions - and with the rapidly increasing military traffic, having to divert around a passing task force was a distinct possibility - they would still be arriving with more than enough time to spare to get the bonus payout.

She sighed in relief. She loved being a freighter captain, but she was honest enough with herself to be able to admit that there were long portions of time during a cargo run that were boring as hell.

She ran through the normal checks; it was something to do while she was here. The deflector shields were functioning at one hundred percent, and - as expected - they had protected the ship from the random pieces of floating shit that would normally put a hole in her hull. Structural integrity was, therefore, holding at a solid one hundred, too. Fuel was still in the green, but only just. With only three more days of travel time left, though, they would only just be inching into the red by the time they made it to Earth. Comms were performing as expected, automatically linking the ship to the nearest Ansible relay and to the wider Imperium communication network without any issues, and no new messages had been received to either her personal or merchant channel. Finally, long-range sensors - as limited as they were on most freighters - were showing nothing suspicious, nor anything that would need to be flown around. As expected, the ship was flying itself flawlessly.

It was not that she wanted to spend fifteen hours a day sitting in the flight seat but using the computer to do all of the heavy lifting on a hop like this still felt a little like cheating to a woman who had worked as hard as she did to become a respected pilot.

Her eyes scanned over the rest of the instruments, even though she already knew what they were going to tell her. Engine temperatures were in the green, the airlocks were sealed and secured, and the life support system was not showing anything out of the ordinary. Today was turning out to be one of her least favorite types of day: completely routine.

God, she was fucking bored.

She considered sending a recording to her mother, it had been a while since they had spoken, but then she remembered that she didn’t really like the old hag and wasn’t in the mood to deal with snide remarks, snippy insults, or passive-aggressive references about how disappointed the old bitch was in her wayward daughter. That was a conversation that could wait for a time when she was pissed off and in more of a mood for a fight. With another sigh, she leaned back in her chair and watched the light show outside the cockpit.

Eventually, her mind drifted back to Dick, or more specifically, the look that had briefly flashed over his face as he had stepped off the ladder. What had he been doing down there? She couldn’t say that she had ever thought he had lied to her in the past, but there was something about his sudden interest in cleanliness that didn’t add up. Then there were the times when she could have sworn she had heard him rummaging around in the hold, in the middle of the night, no less. She didn’t think for a moment he was helping himself to their cargo of rum. Not only had he never smelled of alcohol - and Rigellian rum had a fairly unique aroma - but he had never acted drunk. Half the appeal of that brand of rum was that it got people fucked up pretty damned quickly. More than that, the cargo had been thoroughly inspected and measured when it was loaded and would be again when delivered. It was impossible for him to steal as little as a sip of it without it being detected, and being caught would immediately get him blacklisted from the Merchants Guild books; that was career suicide on a biblical scale if he ever wanted to work on any ship again. The thing is, Dick knew all of this, so he couldn’t possibly be dumb enough to steal from the cargo.

This left the question still unanswered: what the hell was he doing down there?

Well fuck it, it’s not like she had anything else to do. She climbed out of her seat and slid quietly out of the cockpit. Sound, as Dick had proven with his midnight strolls to the cargo bay, carried particularly well in what was essentially a pressurized metal shell, and clod hopping to the ladders and stomping her way down them was a great way to alert him to what she was doing. She had never had reason to be suspicious of Dick before, but he was up to something, and he was hiding it from her. This was her ship, it was her home, and she was going to damned well find out what it was before she decided if it was minor enough to not worry about or serious enough to confront him about.

As lightfooted as possible, she climbed down into the yawning cargo hold. The cargo bay was a very different place in flight than it was when landed. For one thing, it was louder, with less sound dampening from the engine room and less need to smooth out the vibrations that ran through the frame of the ship from the engines themselves. It gave a dull sort of throbbing roaring sound to the ambiance of the enormous room, each throb thrumming in time with the pulse of energy coming from the pulsed ion engines. Secondly, there was less need to light it; nobody was really expected to come down here once the cargo was stowed away, and the vague attempt to provide illumination came from small bulbs, the equivalent of five decks above her head. The whole bay was shrouded in ominous-looking shadows where the light didn’t quite reach. It made it feel oppressive and dangerous, the perfect place for those imagined monsters to hide. Lastly, it was fucking freezing.

All three worked together to pull a hard shiver down Bethany’s spine. She shook it off and stepped into the hold.

Considering her primary cargo was essentially a small crate of ancient automobile parts, and her secondary haul was a few crates of Rigellian rum, the hold appeared practically empty, at least compared to how full it looked for most of her cargo. Those sixteen tons of silicon, for example, had been stored in eight enormous hoppers that, when arranged into the cargo bay, left barely enough room to even walk around them. The emptier look did nothing for the hold’s aesthetic; the sparsely arranged crates gave plenty of room for the long tendrils of shadows to stretch away from the dim light.

Sucking in an apprehensive breath, she strode quietly into the bay and toward the five stacked crates of Rum. Even in the low light, it was obvious that not a single box - each one containing six bottles - had been disturbed. The wrap that prevented the boxes from toppling when the ten-foot-tall pallet was moved had neither been unwrapped nor had it been torn. No human hands could possibly reapply it to the stack in the same even and flawless manner as the machinery that had originally wrapped it, but just to be sure, she climbed up onto one of the ladders to check the very top of the crates. No tampering there, either.

She frowned and let her eyes wander over to the other crate. Much smaller, much lower, and much more valuable. She didn’t remember actually telling Dick what it was, only that it was a special package for the Capital, but a thought flitted through her head, one too absurd to have even considered a week ago, but her crewmate’s recent behaviors had sprinkled a healthy dose of doubt into her mind.

The parts of ancient automobiles were for a museum piece, but it was an exhibit that the Emperor himself was due to visit. If the news was to be believed, the rebels were quite adept at using bombs to assassinate powerful members of the Imperium’s upper echelons, and there was no echelon higher than the Emperor. Could Dick have tampered with that cargo? Could he have been convinced to add something nefarious to it? Could Dick be part of the rebellion? Could he be a traitor?

She had to know.

Bethany climbed off the ladder, stepped closer to the fabulously valuable cargo, and inspected it closely. Of course, that looked untouched, too, but then, if it had been tampered with, let alone had a bomb secreted into it, it would look untouched. It would be a shitty assassin who left obvious clues to his activities, and re-wrapping a cellophane sheath would be the least of the efforts to cover up illicit activities. She stood there staring at the group of four knee-high boxes in front of her and made her decision. She would check it herself, she could always say that the wrap had been damaged during loading, that happened, and she was sure that security would run the appropriate additional scans to make sure that nothing inside the boxes had been tampered with. If it had been tampered with, she could send a transmission to system security and get the freighter intercepted, and Dick arrested - she would be damned if she was going down with him if he was proved guilty - and if it was clear, the removal of the wrapping was easily explained. The question was, how the hell would she find a bomb or whatever it was when it would obviously have been designed to avoid actual security scans.

She blinked into the darkness.

Fuck, this was ridiculous! Was she honestly considering the idea that Dick, of all people, was a goddamned terrorist? Was he up to something? Almost certainly, and he had lied to her face about it; the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became of it. But a traitor? An assassin? Obviously, those sorts of people were masters at covering their tracks and hiding in plain sight, and it was not a huge leap to think that he had been tipped off - or outright told by the rebels - about the true nature of the package before they left Port Collins. But Dick?

And even if he was, how much chance did she, a humble freighter captain, have of finding whatever a trained saboteur had hidden in the package? She had no scanners, at least not anything powerful enough to check properly. Wait ... she did have a scanner. It was used to check the hull for damage if the main sensors were down, nothing that would detect a bomb, but Dick had been down here less than an hour ago; his body heat should still be detectable on, well, anything he touched, and the scanner would let her check without having to fuck with the wrap.

As with most things of that nature, it was kept in the smuggler’s hold along with a lot of the other, smaller maintenance gear that was rarely used. To be fair, Dick’s preoccupation with cleaning dictated that she check that room anyway, so two birds could be mercilessly executed with one efficiently thrown stone, and there was no time like the present.

Turning away from the crates, she strode across the cavernous and mostly empty hanger toward the smuggler’s hold. The door, obviously, was concealed as a bulkhead, and Bethany had to marvel at the ingenious ways the walls of the cargo bay shifted to accommodate this hidden area. There would be nothing more obvious to a customs inspector than a blatantly walled-off section of hold real estate, especially one without a door. But the cargo hold was considerably smaller on the inside than it was on the outside, and even though Bethany knew the hidden compartment was there, even she struggled to be able to spot it. She flipped out the hidden panel, pressed the icon within to open the hatch to the secret hold, and waited for the door to slide open before she stepped inside.

Immediately on her left as she walked through the door was the mop and bucket, dry and empty, respectively. She sighed to herself. Part of her had sorely wanted this whole thing to be a bout of paranoia; she wanted Dick to be completely innocent and to have to retreat to her room to have a long, hard chat with herself about suspecting her own crewmate. But that single sight was enough to tell her that he had indeed been lying to her. “God dammit, Dick,” she muttered to herself before stepping deeper into the hold.

The scanner was very rarely needed, as were the EV suits that were kept in here, both of them used for the same purposes. If the ship’s shields failed and the hull was breached by one of those damned meteorites, someone would need to go out onto the hull to repair the damage. The scanner would allow someone to quickly locate a breach when a visual inspection could take hours, and that was assuming the rock - and the hole it made - was big enough to even be seen by the human eye. She had been in space for most of her adult life and had never been given cause to use this equipment, but, as with many things in her profession, it was better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

She passed the shelves full of cleaning products, the boxes full of seldom-needed spare parts, and wracks of similarly obsolete or rarely required tools before she got to the back of the hold where the scanner was kept. She located its box and flipped it open.