Chapter 9: Chapter 2 – Part 3

“So then Rodriguez, she starts running.  The rest of us were all already at the door, and we’re waving her on.  Come on!  Come on!  Rodriguez had this bizarre gait.  Big on the arm swings, right?  Almost comical.”

 

Wren smiled and nodded.

 

“The manager didn’t notice any of this until we were all already out the door, but once that happened he starts screaming at the top of his lungs.  Police!  Police!  Stop, thief!

 

“Now, at this point, the smart thing to do is keep running because we’re already pretty far ahead.  We just need to get away and lay low for a little while.  Nobody is going to run you down to the edge of the galaxy for skipping out on a meal and none of the patrons were gonna try to get in her way.  Rodriguez was a beast, but…”  Bonnie paused to laugh.  “God bless her, she was not a smart woman.  As soon as she heard him calling her all sorts of names, just cursing her out, she stopped on a dime, enraged, and started running back at the manager.”

 

Wren took their bowls over to the sink and started cleaning them, and Bonnie hopped up on the counter next to her.

 

“Now at this point, she’s running away from me so I can’t see her face, but I can see the way the manager’s face goes from blustery red to sheet white in about two seconds flat.  Another second after that, and he’s running back inside with Rodriguez right behind him.  Big stupid arms swinging for all they’re worth.”

 

Bonnie laughed and shook her head, and then looked around the room.

 

“I think we got most of this cleaned up.  Are you ready to start putting that work desk of yours back together?”

 

Wren nodded as they started walking.

 

“Alright.  Where was I?  Oh.  So the rest of us bug out for the barracks.  We get back in one piece, and we’re trying to keep our mouths shut.  The Captain is asking where Rodriguez is, and we’re trying to make excuses.  Her shift is coming up, and she’s still not back.  An hour, a half hour.  No sign of her.  Ten minutes before her shift comes up, here comes Rodriguez with the biggest fucking grin I’ve ever seen in my life, and right there with her is the goddamn manager.  And he’s grinning too.  She barely has time to shower and change, but that doesn’t stop her from turning and laying a kiss on him that had even me squirming.  Turns out Rodriguez had chased him into…”

 

***

 

“Ten mm,” Wren said, holding out her hand.

 

Bonnie turned and rummaged.  Chrome-plated steel tools clanking against chrome-plated steel tools.  “That next morning,” she said, “everyone was pointedly not staring at us, or gawking, but they also weren’t ribbing us.  Usually, at chow, everyone is fair game, but he and I were immune for a little while.  That was how we knew they heard us.”

 

A socket wrench landed in her palm, and Wren winced as she jammed the crescent wrench in on the other side and braced it against a crossing support beam.

 

“They didn’t say anything, but they knew.  We knew they knew.  By the end of the day, they knew we knew they knew.  That was when things started to get back to normal.  You know what I mean?”

 

Wren nodded.

 

“Are you sure?  Because I’m not even sure I explained that right.”

 

“I’m sure.”

 

“Okay.  Good.  I think they were happy for us.  Anyway, the day after that was when Thierren and Rodriguez started floating around the idea of a unit tattoo for the first time.  It took us a while to settle on something we all could agree on, and…”

 

***

 

“Why not?” Bonnie asked, as she looked up from the darkened panel.

 

“I really don’t want to mess with the grid back here while we’re still in t-space.  If we short something and that fucks with the grav generator in any way, we’d get—”

 

“Okay, okay.”  The redhead delicately closed the panel and turned around.  “Alright.  Well… what else is there to fix?”

 

Wren frowned and turned around.  She’d been dreading this moment.

 

“I think we’ve cleaned up everything we can.”

 

“Yeah,” Wren said softly.

 

“And everything else we’d either need to be outside for or we’d need things powered down, right?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Okay.  Well.”  Bonnie leaned against one of the racks and looked around.  “Where was I?”

 

“You guys were on Tamblin station.”

 

“Right.  So Tamblin station was one of those early stations that, everywhere you turn, it was trying to look like it wasn’t a station at all.  It had ‘buildings’ inside, and space to look up.  Incredibly inefficient use of inner environment.  Pretty, though, but we had trouble with that.  We were used to moving through a completely different kind of area, and having that much open space to cross, or where someone might see us coming from way above, it was like… like we didn’t have the tactics for that, you know?  We weren’t prepared for planetside combat.”

 

Wren nodded.

 

“But they had a problem too, see?  They were thinking about protecting themselves on two dimensions.  Front and back, left and right.  Maybe from above too, I don’t know.  They were used to being on a planet, where there’s ground underneath them, and tunnelling isn’t exactly a quick solution.  So we’re pinned down, and ops can’t get anyone further up the chain to respond.  Suddenly, out of nowhere, here comes Haircut and a Suit—”

 

“No,” Wren said incredulously.

 

“He’s not there, not on Tamblin, but he gets on our secure comm with this big shit-eating grin because who should have a bunch of huge, idle, automated construction drones two decks below but fucking Chandless.”

 

“No!”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“That’s… that’s pretty convenient.”

 

Bonnie’s smile flattened, just a little.  “Yeah.”

 

***

 

“You know, I had a sick feeling, when that building started collapsing, that the whole thing was going to come down on us, and I had no idea how right I was.  The Navy dismissed all of our reports as ‘lacking credibility’.  There was no record of any Chandless equipment on site, no record of Haircut and a Suit working for Chandless at any time, communicating with us at any time or having contributed to the deaths of all those…”  She trailed off with a small sound in her throat.  

 

“He didn’t exist?”

 

“Conor P. Hillenbrand did not exist.  Not according to Chandless, anyway, and the Navy weighed their testimony heavier than ours.  Every single one of us was dishonorably discharged very quickly.  We were out on our asses inside of… a week?  I think?”

 

“What the fuck?”

 

“I know.  It was over just like that.  Or at least, that’s what we thought.  Turns out, the Navy had also blacklisted all of us.  It wasn’t even like we could go find other jobs with the skills they’d taught us.  Not legal ones, anyway.”  She took a few deep breaths and sighed.  “It was easy to blame the insurgents.  Some of us did.  I mean, they’d started a shooting conflict, but really they were just trying to be heard.  They thought if they holed up in a bunker with a bunch of kids as hostages, they could finally get someone to listen.”

 

“And Chandless dropped a building on them.”

 

“More or less,” Bonnie said, looking down.

 

“I think I missed something.  What was it they were demanding?”

 

***

 

Wren fidgeted nervously, picking at the skin beside her fingernails.  It made her uncomfortable to have Bonnie at the controls.

 

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“UPNS Aught-Eight-Six-Four-Two-Two, this is Freighter Niner-One-Victor-Victor-Eight.”

 

“Freighter Niner-One-Victor-Victor-Eight, we have no scheduled flight plan listed for you and your IFF is FUBAR.  State your business.”

 

Bonnie cleared her throat and smiled.  “UPNS Aught-Eight-Six-Four-Two-Two, we got hit by scavengers and suffered some damage.  Requesting permission to dock for repairs.”

 

“Permission granted, Freighter Niner-One-Victor-Victor-Eight.  Do you require any special accommodations or have any exotic cargo to declare?”

 

“No cargo,” Bonnie said, “but we do have some passengers from Angstrom Station that sustained injuries on the flight. Mostly scrapes and bruises, but one man went into cardiac arrest.  We have him thoroughly sedated.”

 

The comm was quiet for a moment, and the hairs stood up on Wren’s neck.  Bonnie had explained how all this would work, but it was quite another thing to see it happen.

 

“Freighter Niner-One-Victor-Victor-Eight, please switch to channel Zero-Point-Seven-One-Seven-Zero."

 

“Here we go,” Bonnie said, under her breath, as she reached over and adjusted the comm.

 

“陈述你的目的.”

 

“I’ve gotta learn Chinese,” Wren lamented.

 

Bonnie smiled and held her hand over the mic.  “I might be biased, but I think it’s beautiful.”  She cleared her throat and adjusted her posture.  “郑氏车站, 这是  JBH Daedalus.”

 

“...Daedalus?” 

 

Bonnie frowned, brow lowered.  “是的.”

 

“我们认得你的呼号, 你们的到来实在让我们非常棘手.”

 

Wren did everything she could to refrain from asking Bonnie to translate line by line, and to a certain extent, Bonnie’s nervous body language said enough.

 

“我是李宝钗,” Bonnie said, “Jackson Chua Kim Huat 会代表我说话.”

 

“请保持位置!”

 

Bonnie sat back and exhaled loudly.

 

“And?!”

 

The redhead shrugged.  “And... now we wait.”

 

Wren bounced up on her toes and watched the display beside the pilot’s chair.  The auto-pilot had received and confirmed an approach vector and a specific berth was pending.  “That sounded like it went well.  Did it go well?”

 

“We’ll see.”

 

“We’ll see?  That’s all you’ve got to tell me?”

 

Bonnie held up her hands and smiled.  “I’m not a pilot.  I don’t usually bring ships in.  I know how this works in theory, but I usually just have to sneak on board.”

 

“JBH Daedalus, 把你的飞船停靠在大门口 Alpha-Gamma-One-Zero-Four-Four.”

 

“谢谢你.” Bonnie said, nodding her head slightly.

 

“抵达后，站在开口处，所有乘客都将被搜查.”

 

“了解.”  Bonnie licked her lips and turned.  “Wren, if you have any secret compartments in this ship, now would be the time to tell me.”

 

Wren shrugged and shook her head.  “Nothing like that.”

 

“Okay.  We’ve got… a couple hours before we dock.”

 

The auto-pilot made adjustments to their course as they were directed around to the far side of the station.  Bonnie watched the readouts for another minute, and then turned the chair around.

 

“So…”  She swallowed and sat back, eyes drifting upward.  “The next call never came.  A few days, a week.  I started worrying.  A few weeks.  I waited, like he asked me to, but with every day, I felt more and more sure he’d gotten in over his head.  I tried not to look at it, but eventually I started sifting through the copies he’d made.  Personnel files.  Strategic memos.  Tons of documents.

 

“He’d made notes on some of it, and that was really helpful because I do not have a head for putting stuff like that together.  This report over here is itemizing the value of a bunch of assets and this memo here is talking about a very different value for a different set of assets with some items that might be on both lists, and it took me a while to realize that not all of these are under the same name.  It’s the same ship or, you know, sometimes a piece of property, but these two companies are both claiming ownership of these things.”

 

“What companies?”

 

“Several.  Chandless was the name on most of them, but I saw a few others I recognized.  Jyi Bao was one of them.  And most of these assets had these RA numbers attached to them.  Kel had marked ‘risk assessment’ with a big question mark next to it.”

 

“Did he ever get in contact with you?”

 

“Yes,” she said gravely.  “About a month later, I got a cryptic message from him.  ‘Everything is fine.  Can’t wait to see you.’  I got out of there so fast, and was heading out of the system on a passenger ship within the hour.”

 

“Yeah, that’s not creepy at all,” Wren laughed, nervously.  “No clues about where he’d been or what had held him up?”

 

Bonnie shook her head.  “I don’t even think it was him that sent it.  That wasn’t what we’d agreed on.  I don’t have the skills to take apart a message and read the, like, what-do-you-call-it?”

 

“You mean, like, the metadata?”

 

“Yeah, that.  Header stuff.  You put a target in front of me, and I’m good.  You give me a message, and the most I’m gonna get from it is exactly what it says.  I tried getting in touch with Thierren, but the lady that got back to me told me he’d passed away.  Same thing for Kira and Leung.”

 

“Kira?”

 

Bonnie nodded soberly.  “After the trial, I cut myself off.  I don’t know if it was guilt or what, but I shut down for a while and went off grid.  I had…”  She paused to compose herself.  “I’d let my service be my identity, and having that stripped away left me with very little.  I still don’t know how McCoy found me.

 

“At that point, I stopped trying to contact them directly and started looking them up first.  There’d been thirty of us back in basic.  Not counting McCoy, there were eight of us still alive.”

 

“Oh my god.”

 

“Yeah, I couldn’t… it was all different things.  One ship was lost in t-space, never arrived at its destination.  Rodriguez had been shot in a bar.  Haft had stage IV brain cancer.  Isolated incidents with nothing to connect them.”

 

“Yeah, but twenty one of them?”

 

Bonnie nodded again.  “I bounced around for a little while.  Tried to study the documents more, but it just wasn’t coming to me.  Got hooked up with some people, those people gave me some names, and eventually I found my way here.  Cheng Shih Station.”

 

“So these are allies?”

 

“They’ll fix your ship.”  Bonnie grimaced.  “I’ll make sure of that.”

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