The End of All Things

  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.

  “I know what it is,” Captain Thao said. “I need you to help me with it.”

  “All right,” I said. “How?”

  “You worked on the piloting systems as a programmer, yes? Lee tells me you did.”

  “I did several years ago,” I said, glancing over at Han, whose expression was blank.

  “So you know how it works.”

  “I haven’t worked on the code for the most recent versions of the software, but it’s built using the same language and compilers,” I said. “I wouldn’t have a problem catching up on it.”

  “The piloting system has the ability to accept encoded commands, yes? Destinations can be plugged in without openly revealing what they are.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s a standard feature. It was put into military piloting software so if a ship or drone is captured, it’d be harder for whoever captured it to find out its destination. We don’t usually use the secure mode on trade ships because there’s no point. We have to file courses with the Colonial Union anyway. They know where we’re going.”

  “I have an encrypted destination on this memory card,” Thao said. “Can you tell me where it is?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s encrypted.” And then I realized that it was entirely possible that last comment came out in my “condescending nerd” voice, so I quickly added to it. “What I mean is that I would need the encryption key for it. I don’t have it.”

  “The system has it,” Thao said.

  “Right, but the system doesn’t tell us what it is,” I said. “The point of the secure mode is to let the navigation computer and only the navigation computer know where the ship is going.”

  “Could you crack it without a key?”

  “The encryption?” I asked. Thao nodded. “How much time do I have?”

  “How long until skip?”

  I checked my monitor. “Twelve hours, twenty-three minutes.”

  “That long.”

  “No,” I said. “If you gave me a month I could maybe do it. Or if I had passwords or biometrics or whatever it was that let whoever gave you that memory card into the encryption system in the first place.” I motioned to the card. “Was that encrypted on the Chandler?”

  “No.”

  “I would need more time than we have, then, ma’am.”

  Captain Thao nodded, moody, and looked over to Han.

  “May I ask what’s going on, ma’am?” I said.

  “No,” Captain Thao said. She reached out to me with the memory card. “I need you to put this new destination into the navigation system. Let Han know when you’ve done it and the new destination is confirmed.”

  I took the card. “It’ll take about a minute and a half,” I said.

  “Fine,” Thao said. “Tell Han anyway.” She left without saying anything else. I looked over at Han. He was still working on his utterly neutral face.

  * * *

  “Mr. Daquin,” Secretary Ocampo said, as he opened the door to his stateroom and saw me standing on the other side of it. “This is unexpected. Come inside, please.” He stood aside to let me in.

  I entered the stateroom, which was roughly twice the size of my own, which is to say, the size of two broom closets. A lot of the space was taken up by Ocampo’s luggage, which was, as Vera Briggs hinted, a lot for a month-long trip. But Ocampo struck me as a likely candidate for being a clotheshorse, so maybe that volume of luggage wasn’t unusual for him.

  “I apologize for it being cramped,” Ocampo said.

  “It’s bigger than my quarters,” I said.

  “I would hope so!” Ocampo said, and then laughed. “No offense,” he said, afterwards.

  “None taken,” I said.

  “We’re fortunate Vera isn’t in here as well, we might not be able to move,” Ocampo said, and sat in the chair next to his very small table. “Now, let me guess why you’re here, Mr. Daquin. I’m guessing that sometime in the last few hours, your captain came to you with a new destination, is that correct?”

  “It might be,” I said.

  “Might be indeed,” Ocampo replied. “And this new destination is secret, and now I strongly suspect that you and the rest of the Chandler crew are having a merry little time speculating about where this destination is, why we might be going there, and why your captain is following an order that no one should have been able to give her. Is that about right?”

  “That’s about the size of it, yes.”

  “And I bet you were volunteered by the rest of the crew to come see me about it, because you and I shared a boat ride over to the Chandler.”

  “No, sir,” I said. “You’re right that the crew is talking about it. But none of them put me up to this. I came on my own.”

  “That’s either initiative or stupidity, Mr. Daquin.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Maybe a little of both.”

  “That’s equally possible, sir.”

  Ocampo laughed. “You understand that if I can’t tell your captain where we’re going, I’m not going to be able to tell you.”

  “I understand that,” I said. “I’m not here about the ‘what,’ sir. I’m here about the ‘why.’”

  “The why,” Ocampo said.

  “Yes,” I said. “As in why the number two person in all of the Colonial Union State Department is pretending to go on vacation to an arctic mountain range and using a cargo ship to get there, instead of just taking a State Department ship with a formal diplomatic mission on it to wherever and whomever he is meeting and negotiating with.”

  “Well,” Ocampo said, after a moment. “And here I thought I was being clever about it.”

  “You were, sir,” I said. “But it looks different inside the ship than out of it.”

  “Fair enough. Have a seat, Daquin,” Ocampo said, motioning to his bunk. I sat. “Let’s talk theoretical scenarios for a moment. Are you okay with that?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What do you know about how the Colonial Union is doing these days?”

  “I know we’re not on very good terms with the Earth anymore.”

  Ocampo snorted. “You’ve unintentionally made the understatement of the year. It’s more accurate to say the Earth hates the Colonial Union’s guts, thinks we are evil, and wants us all to die. They blame us for the destruction of Earth Station, which was their major egress into space. They think we did it.”

  “And we didn’t.”

  “No, of course not. But many of the ships used in the attack were pirated from the Colonial Union. You’ve heard about that, at least? Cargo ships like this one being captur
ed and turned into attack vehicles?”

  I nodded. This was one of the more wild rumors out there—that pirates, or someone posing as pirates, would take and board ships, but instead of the cargo, they were after the ships themselves. They would use the ships to attack targets in the Colonial Union and in the Conclave, a big political union of alien races.

  I thought it was wild because it didn’t make much sense. Not that the ships were taken; I knew that was true. Everyone in space knows someone whose ship was lost. But it didn’t make sense to use cargo ships as attack platforms. There were easier ways to strike both the Colonial Union and the Conclave.

  But now Ocampo was telling me that part wasn’t just a rumor. That these things were happening. One more reason, I guess, to be glad to be doing a trade run safely inside the Colonial Union’s borders.

  Except now we weren’t doing that safe trade run anymore.

  “Because the ships were originally from the Colonial Union, it looks like the Colonial Union attacked,” Ocampo said. “And so our diplomatic relations with nearly every nation on Earth are entirely shut off. Even those we’re not entirely shunned by we still have to be very careful approaching. Understand me so far?”

  I nodded again.

  Ocampo nodded in response. “In which case, Mr. Daquin, ask yourself: If the number two man of the Colonial Union State Department wanted to pry open diplomatic relations with the Earth, even just a crack, in a way that didn’t immediately require everyone involved to strike a political pose, how might he do it?”

  “By pretending to go on vacation but actually commandeering a trade ship to take him to an unofficial meeting at a secret destination, perhaps,” I said.

  “That might be one way, yes,” Ocampo agreed.

  “But he would still need to convince that ship’s captain.”

  “Convincing takes on many forms,” Ocampo said. “One form might be an official request from the Colonial Union itself, the refusal of which would cause the ship in question to be refused dock at any space station the Colonial Union controls. Which would be all of them, in Colonial Union space.”

  “And the refusal would happen because the captain didn’t play ball.”

  “Well, officially there would be all sorts of reasons given,” Ocampo said. “It would vary from station to station and from circumstance to circumstance. But in reality, it would be the Colonial Union expressing its displeasure at the lack of cooperation, yes.”