Ch. 10: Journey
“Mutiny! Security, to me!”
Written with German Yanovsky
CHAPTER TEN
1036 Ganymed
same day
Arai kept his metal arm tight around Rue’s shoulder as they pushed through the throng of protesters. He was talking, low and fast, but not to her: “Vi? Where are ya right now?...Yeah, need you an’ Liv ta round up da boys, tell ’em go in five. Aite. Switch me over ta Caz…Listen man, we tried ta delay dis for ya…Yeah. Yeah...Yeah, I know, but da shit’s already started an’ ya gotta get Mama off da boulevard now. I mean now, I’m doin’ my best fer yer family ’ere.”
“Let me talk to her,” Rue cut in, and followed up by summoning her daemon and addressing the same command to it: “Get me through to Mama Nova.”
To Rue’s eyes alone, the wolf appeared, slipping with incorporeal grace in an effortless weave among the legs of the real-life marchers. “Now contacting, Philomena Jones,” it growled.
The grayed-out box in the corner of her vision popped up, with a green dotted line that turned solid after a moment: “Yes, baby?” Philomena’s voice asked in her ear. And then the video link snapped in, and instead of just the green line Rue saw a small representation of the same scene her eyes were witnessing, but from a different perspective: marchers and storefronts and blank-faced security forces, as Philomena passed them some ways farther down the boulevard. That box got bigger as she focused on it and contracted again when her gaze shifted.
The only real difference in their views was that Philomena was moving with the crowd, while Arai was shouldering through them as he pulled Rue along, up and toward the exit.
“Mama, something terrible’s happened,” Rue said, letting her voice go small and shaky. “Please, I need you. Caz is coming for you right now, please come and please hurry.” She played up her distress shamelessly, letting the tears well up and a sob break her voice. “You can’t go to the diner. We’re running, I—I’ve got to go, end connection.”
She thought she was being slick, but the tears kept streaming down her cheeks even after the video link and her daemon had both winked out. I’m fine, Rue told herself firmly, and took deep breaths. This is still better than Luna during the attack, when everyone was dying. I’m fine. I was acting.
Arai still had his arm around her, shepherding her along. Yer safe now, he’d said, twice. Darting glances at the riot cops to either side, Rue didn’t feel exactly safe. But she breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, counting three seconds for each, until she’d stopped crying.
“Once ya got ’er come back to da ship, don’t know how long we ’ave ’fore everytin’ goes ta shit but it ain’ a lot o’ time.” Arai still wasn’t talking to Rue. “Vi? Where we at? I’m jus’ about ta board.”
And then he pulled her into a gap between two storefronts. There was sort of an accidental back alley behind them, created by the haphazard way individual storage units had been pushed together. Arai dropped his arm from her shoulder because they had to go single file. But there was a kind of path back there, and they made better time hurrying down it on their own then they had done fighting the tide of marchers.
When they came out of the little alley on the other end, they were, as Arai had told Vi, nearly out of Hab C. They scurried along the last stretch of boulevard, and then made it to the transitional area linking the three Habs with Garnata’s dock.
“Oh no,” Rue whispered, as her stomach threatened to rebel again with the weak and fluctuating gravity. They crossed the pole of the spinning habitat construction: and then her feet left the ground and she was dry-heaving, again, grateful that there was nothing left in her stomach to throw up.
Arai turned back, grabbing her once more—around the wrist this time—and pulled her along. She staggered and involuntarily skipped across the threshold, half-running and half-flying, until it was all weightless and they were simply careening through the air.
In zero g even the least kick would send you zooming across a space, and there was no way to recover mid-air if you’d misjudged a launch. Normally maneuvering was all about feather-light pushes, and calculated angles. Rue had grown up in Luna’s forgiving gravity and she’d been able to adjust pretty quickly for the most part. Only abrupt changes in g forces still caught her up.
Arai wasn’t doing feather-light pushes and calculated angles, not right now. He reached out to handle the impact with surfaces as they neared, and kicked off immediately to the next. Rue found herself banged around a bit as he pulled her along, and the coat slipped from her shoulders; he paused to grab it and to hoist her up securely under his arm again. Then she had only the dry heaves to manage.
“Gonna hafta get yer space legs, Red.” This time he was talking to her.
“Working on it!” she gritted out.
Now aboard Garnata, they were descending through decks to the heart of the ship. Rue was only half-familiar with most of the ship’s layout, but occasionally she glimpsed a sign or a scrawl of graffiti she’d seen before. They shot down a ladder well and came out in a dimly-lit area, darkness broken only by minimal red LEDs at staggered intervals. Arai dropped her to push himself forward into the shadows.
Liv and Vi were waiting there, along with Kaprolli, Park, Taylor, and a few men whose names Rue didn’t know. One of the Vicious Sisters handed Arai a bundle and he took it: a gun and holster, which he immediately strapped on.
“What’s she doing here?” Taylor said, eyeing Rue coldly.
“Helpin’,” Arai said. “She’s got a knack wit’ da network, gonna make sure nothin’ gets out before we’re ready.”
“Here,” Vi, or maybe Liv, said, and Rue automatically accepted what she was handed before she realized it was another gun.
“Oh, I—I don’t know how to use this,” she protested.
Arai turned around and wrapped his hands around hers, one metal, one flesh. She felt the different way the two sets of fingers worked (the metal ones were cold) as he guided her own hands around the handle of the gun. “Ain’ gene science. Coilguns, flip dis switch, wait fer da green light, point it at someone ya don’ like an’ pull da trigger.”
He dropped her hands with as little ceremony as he’d taken them, maneuvering himself back to face the others. Rue set about fastening her holster—it made an incongruous accessory to her little pink skirt—as he said: “None o’ us wanted t’ings ta come ta dis. We’ve served our years on da holy spud, followed orders, worked ’ard.”
Rue had been around long enough to pick up that the holy spud nickname came from the ISRU-TEK logo. Asteroid 1036 Ganymed with its cratered, potato-like appearance, haloed by a flashy ring in the corporate insignia.
Arai went on. “ISRU-TEK was proud o’ us, an’ dere was a time when some ’o us were proud o’ dem. But dey’re gone, an’ we gotta keep goin’. Cap’n Tolse’s ready ta surrender. We’re makin’ some other options. Yeah?”
Into the pause he looked around, the red glow from his prosthetic eye illuminating shadowy faces. “We’re doin’ dis fer ourselves, fer all o’ us,” he prodded. “Defendin’ what we built. Lookin’ out fer da crew an’ each other.”
“Yeah,” said Liv, or maybe Vi. The other one chorused: “Yeah,” and then there were soft nods and breaths of affirmation all around.
“Aite,” Arai said. “Lez go. Red, stay at da back.”
The small crew began to push out, stealthy streamlined shapes zooming off into the dark. They came to another ladder well and swam up it like a school of fish. Arai was easy to pick out at the front, his prosthetic eye glowing. Rue hung back as ordered, being careful about her pushes and her angles.
She remembered the bridge, tucked safely at the center of the ship’s mass. She recognized when they got close, moving once more into the harshly illuminated sections. And yet the sense that she was making some sort of momentous choice—an alliance against all authority that couldn’t ever be taken back—didn’t fully hit her until Arai turned back and said: “Now, Red. Turn it all off, lights an’ network.”
It helped that it wasn’t her first time. First mutiny to be sure, first time running with a pirate crew, but hardly her first time ruining her family name or “making poor choices” as they’d say. Would have said.
She’d had this stomach-dropping sense of plunging from a moral precipice before, and perhaps she could think of the present moment as merely an extension of her teenage rebellions back on Luna. How many times had she run away to the under levels, trying and failing to cut herself off from her family’s surveillance?
But now they were gone, and would never be able to answer for her childhood grudges. And Rue was 46 million miles away, whispering into her armpit for the benefit of a glitched-out daemon—because it was suddenly much too late to be reconsidering choices, even ones she had never consciously made, like being a front-line part of this mutiny—“Okay, do it, do it now.”
Her visualization worked better this time; the wolf popped up immediately. “I’m sorry, Rue Áine,” it said in a static-filled voice. “I didn’t catch that. Please try restating your command.”
“Turn the whole network off like you said you could,” she hissed. “Lights too, turn them off, now.”
The ragged wolf with its matted fur slowly blinked at her. “I understood your directive to be: disable local communications and ambient lighting. Is that what you would like me to do?”
“Yyyyyes?” She was unsure, but the daemon took her assent and winked out, along with the lights.
Or most of the lights. Muted red LEDs still marked an intermittent path along the base of the passageway, near the deck. And Arai’s prosthetic eye was bright in the darkness. “Aite, movin’ in,” he said, surging off as soon as he’d spoken. The others all followed.
Rue caught herself fingering at the safety on her gun, to make sure she hadn’t accidentally activated it. She realized in the same moment that fiddling with it was more likely to make that happen, and snatched her hand back. And she had just enough time to complete that train of thought before Arai’s group opened a hatch and stormed onto the bridge.
“Nobody move! John Tolse, yer bein’ relieved o’ command.” Rue hesitated, the last one lingering out in the darkened passageway, but she could hear Arai shouting inside.
Tolse’s answer was harder to hear: his voice lower, cadence steady and grave. “On whose authority and by what cause?”
Rue pulled herself closer to the hatch, trying to see: there were a few points of light on the otherwise darkened bridge. The screens were all black, but strips of emergency lighting led to the hatch. Arai’s red eye, and the green lights of the coilguns that he and the others held in their fists, marked other points of illumination in the shadows. The bridge crew were all strapped into chairs while the invaders floated, but quarters were close, and easy grips available.
“Authority derivin’ from da fact ya ain’ paid us,” Arai said, “an’ fer pretty much dat same reason.”
From one side, one of the Vicious Sisters said: “And we don’t want to roll over and put our necks under Aethonic’s boots.”
The other sister answered: “That’s a cause too.”
“You cannot possibly have considered the consequences of this action.” There was less heat in Tolse’s tone than Rue would have expected: he spoke slowly, and sounded tired. “Anarchy and chaos. Every man for himself. Total ruination.”
“We know what we’re doin’,” Arai said. “Now c’mon. Nobody wants ta hurtcha, but yer bein’ escorted from da ship. Basta, Lee, watch dese boys on da bridge till we’re sure of ’em. No messages in or out.”
“Aye-aye, Cap’n Wolf,” drawled the one of the men. Arai snorted.
But Tolse didn’t move from the chair he was strapped into. “Pilot Commander,” he went on, grave and low and sad. “I have attempted to shield you from the consequences of your recklessness aboard Valentine because you were sent on that mission under my authorization. But now you are not only sealing your own doom but looking to bring down the entire crew with you. All of you must realize...you are seeking catastrophe.”
“Ahhh, catastrophe’s already ’ere, we’re jus’ doin’ da best we can wit’ it,” Arai said, and grabbed ahold of the captain’s chair, pulling himself in close. His prosthetic hand gripped a gun pointed at Tolse, and it stayed dead steady, even when he released the chair and yanked instead at the straps keeping Tolse buckled in. “Lez go.”
The captain gave no resistance. When he’d finished with the straps Arai grabbed Tolse’s arm and twisted it behind his back, dragging the other man out of his chair. They pushed off back toward the hatch, Arai’s gun shoved into the small of Tolse’s back, and Rue ducked back as they emerged.
Caught by her movement, Tolse’s attention swiveled to Rue. The passageway was tight enough that he passed within inches of her as Arai pushed him forward. She had a nightmarish flash of his face illuminated in the dimness: the spiderwebbed veins sagging beneath his watery eyes, and the moment of recognition as they passed. It chilled her.
But Arai gave her a wink (though it might have been a blink). “Can lift da black-out now, Red,” he said as he went by.
Then Liv and Vi were passing her too, along with Park, Kaprolli and the others. Rue stayed pressed up against the side of the passageway until they’d all gotten out, and brought up the daemon again so she could tell it: “Whatever you just did—undo it. Put things back the way they were before.”
The passageway flooded again with harsh white illumination, and on the bridge, screens flickered back to life. Rue turned away, pulling herself after the rest of the group.
They didn’t quite retrace their steps; they’d taken a roundabout path to reach the bridge, and the way back was more direct. But as soon as they emerged back onto the docks Rue could tell things had changed in Hab C. Distant shouts filtered out to them: cries of anger, and pain. People were fighting.
Arai grunted. “Dey musta found Niels.”
“What do you mean, found Niels?” one of the Vicious Sisters demanded, and the other followed up wearily:
“Goddammit, Arai.”
“He was doin’ water torture on our lil hooker-wit-a-heart-o-gold, ’ere,” Arai protested, with a vague wave back in Rue’s direction. “Member when you an’ me found da doc’s specimen cages? Wit’ da kittens? Felt da same way ’bout what I saw today as I did den. ’Cept Niels ain’ a surgeon an’ no matter what ’e t’ought o’ himself, dis station don’ need ’im. So I put a stop ta it, in da quickest way possible. Blame me all ya want fer it, had ta be done.”
“It’s true,” Rue spoke up. “I called him for help. If...if he hadn’t...intervened. Niels would’ve killed me, I think.”
“Doubt it,” Kaprolli rumbled from one side. “Niels was a lot of things but not wasteful. Waterboarding always makes you feel like you’re dying, that’s the point of it.” Rue eyed him, trying to judge whether this was meant to be comforting.
“Situation is what it is,” Arai said. “Niels’s dead. John Tolse, t’ank ya fer yer service, ya ain’ welcome on Garnata no more. Suggest ya avoid da circlejerk on Hab C an’ head straight fer da Admin. Tell ’im I’ll take ’is call from da bridge.” And with that, he released Tolse with a shove that sent the former captain zooming across the weak-gravity space.
But as soon as Tolse caught up against a wall, he aimed himself at the entrance to Hab C. “Mutiny!” he shouted in a strong and forceful voice. “Mutiny! Security, to me!”
“Ahhhh, fuuuu—” That was as much as Arai got out, spinning as he already was, before he started shouting new orders. “Back. Back! Inta da ship an’ seal it!”
They tried. But there wasn’t time. Rue, at the rear, had barely managed to drag herself into Garnata’s airlock before black-helmeted riot cops stormed onto the docks.
Arai was the first to shoot. There was a high-pitched whine and then a sharp, multistage CRA-CRA-CRACK as his ferromagnetic projectiles released, each bullet creating a sonic boom by the speed of its discharge. The recoil slammed him backwards and he was thrown into the airlock, crashing hard against a bulkhead.
After that others opened fire too. In a matter of seconds and an exchange of gunfire that rolled through the docks like crashing thunder, three people were dead. Kaprolli, one of the Ops police, and Tolse, caught in the crossfire: all of the bullet-ridden bodies leaking thick ballooning bubbles of blood into the air as they slowly drifted downward.
More were wounded. After the initial barrage there was a lull, and Taylor surged past Rue, her face a rictus of pain. Her right hand was clamped against her left bicep, where blood was seeping through her fingers. The Operations forces coordinated on their own channel, but through negotiations soundless to the others they fell back into Hab C, taking their own dead and injured with them.
Arai pulled himself back out, grabbing at those who remained on the docks and pushing them towards the ship. Then something caught his attention and he paused.
The screens in Hab C had changed. Instead of calm sunny skies they all showed Gardezi’s face, magnified and scowling down on the boulevard. “ATTENTION JOURNEY STATION,” the Administrator said, his voice blaring from multiple speakers. Even so Rue could barely hear it: the gunfire had left everything distant and tinny. “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. ALL OPERATIONS PERSONNEL REPORT TO HABITAT A, REPEAT, ALL OPERATIONS PERSONNEL WITHDRAW FROM HABITAT C AND REPORT TO HABITAT A. ALL OTHERS SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY.”
Arai stayed where he was, watching. Rue leaned out, trying to get a better view, and belatedly hefted her gun. Park made his way to Kaprolli, futilely trying to administer first aid, and the Vicious Sisters went out to flank Arai.
“TAKE SHELTER AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTION,” Gardezi proclaimed, and then the screens in Hab C went back to mild skies.
“We gotta get Kaprolli to the doc,” Park said. He was now smeared with blood from his efforts to staunch the wounds: but Arai looked over, his eye flaring with a bright red light as he gave Kaprolli’s body a swift once-over.
“He’s dead,” Arai said, confirming what the others could already see. “Grab ’im, an’ Tolse too—Liv an’ Vi, feet an’ ’ead. He was our cap’n, we’ll show ’im respect. Bury him an’ Kaprolli both at space tomorrow bright an’ early, oh-eight-hundred. Now go, lez move, get da ship sealed off.”
“What about Caz and Mama Nova?” Rue asked, and Arai’s cold gaze fixed on her. “They’re still out there!”
“Dey’ll be fine. Hunkered down in Hab B last I heard from ’em. We ain’ leavin’ yet, jus’ fortifyin’ our position. C’mon, move.”
She did, pulling herself back into the ship with the others close behind her. Arai gave another order, there was cross-chatter…but then the airlock sealed behind them, with an echoing slam and a hiss of hydraulics.
“What an absolute clusterfuck,” Liv, or Vi, said into the silence that dropped afterwards. And to that, nobody—not even her twin—had an answer.
If you want to read ahead, Journey is available in paperback and e-book formats from Amazon ($2.99 for Kindle). But what it really needs is word of mouth, so even better than buying the book is leaving an Amazon/Goodreads review, or posting a link on your social media, or forwarding to a friend. The first reader to make a TikTok about it will receive a free signed paperback—link me your video to redeem this offer.
On the Journey Station soundtrack (Spotify | YouTube), this chapter is set to BANKS, “Beggin For Thread.”