3

“At least you didn’t lose your eye,” Lieutenant Briggs said, leaning to one side to examine the fresh vertical scar down the left side of my face.

“What do you care? You’re not even fucking real,” I grumbled. “X, make him leave.”

“This is your nightmare, not mine,” X-37 responded. “I have attempted to regulate your sleep eleven times already, but your body has adjusted to even my most aggressive methods. I’m afraid you’re on your own.”

“All right, then,” Briggs said, standing abruptly from the cheap hospital chair and drawing a combat knife from his belt. “I’ll have that eye now.”

“Not until you tell me what happened to the woman.” It was a stupid thing to say. I couldn’t move or resist him and this had already happened years ago. Dreams were screwed up like that.

“Doesn’t matter,” Briggs said, pushing on my forehead to hold my head against the hospital bed pillow. “You’re mine now.”

“She had two little girls!” I shouted as light drained from the nightmare room.

“Your heart rate is increasing, Reaper Cain. It won’t be long before you wake up,” X-37 promised.

“Yeah, right after he stabs me!” I couldn’t move because this was a dreamscape spiraling into imaginary violence.

“He never stabbed you in the eye in reality. You signed on the dotted line, Reaper Cain. Doctors removed your eye, not Briggs and not shrapnel,” X-37 said, his voice calm and distant through the veil of the nightmare.

The blade lashed toward my face as I cursed at Briggs to just fucking stop.

* * *

I had spent a lot of time in solitary confinement in the Bluesphere Maximum Security Prison. It was the worst kind of punishment—complete isolation with thoughts of my death sentence to keep me company. Training and experience had prepared me for the ordeal. During my years in the BSMP, I’d constructed a fantasy existence with very strict rules to prevent insanity.

There had to be rules to keep things from getting too crazy. Back then, I had my real routine that the guards forced on me, but also my own inner life. Some of the staples of this existence had been reading an imaginary book—actually holding up my hands and pretending I was flipping from screen to screen while my mind invented fictional stories or nonfiction articles—pretending to eat regular meals that didn’t taste like paste excreted from the prison wall dispensers, and every evening I sipped imaginary whiskey and smoked cigars.

I wasn’t crazy at all.

After Dreadmax, I had found cigars on Gronic, Roxo III, and various Deadlands shitholes the residents claimed were frontier towns or cities. The Gronic Fats had become a favorite of mine, better than many Starbrand fakes. Then, sadly, I experienced my first real Starbrand cigar courtesy of James Henshaw. 

This ruined me forever. Now I lived to find something as good. 

Henshaw had been an unwitting provider, not realizing how many Starbrand Premiums I had stolen from him until much later.

We were far beyond even the Deadlands now. Once or twice we had descended to the surface of unexplored planets and gathered raw resources, including more than one plant that resembled tobacco. X-37 and Jelly scanned all of the organics we harvested down to a molecular level. There was a lot of variety in what humans could consume, but that didn’t mean the options were unlimited. Maybe there wasn’t good tobacco on every world suitable for human habitation, but there was usually something close.

Which was interesting.

I snatched up a few plants whenever I could. As a novice tobacconist, I had a lot to learn. Making my own cigars, I now realized, was a lot harder than finding good paper or manufacturing a suitable substitute. Tom had been instrumental in that process, which had taken weeks to learn. 

Long story short, making a single cigar in the middle of an uncharted region of space was a ridiculous amount of work. But that was what I did with my free time in slip space. Training and mission planning first, then cigars.

“Are you paying attention, X?” I said, not looking away from the synths-paper I was rolling around the tobacco I had dried during our last slip tunnel jump.

“I’m always paying attention, Reaper Cain,” X-37 said. “If you want my advice, I think you should move your fingers closer to the end of the paper and pinch more tightly before beginning the rolling action.”

I tried what he said and it actually helped. We fell into a rhythm and I relaxed. That was the real reason I went through all this trouble. I needed to quiet the primitive part of my brain. Path had meditation, I had cigar production.

Thoughts came and went without my interference. I found myself wondering about Bug, the kid who had been on the other end of the speaker boxes on Dreadmax. He’d been in a surveillance tower and had access to cameras. Probably saved my life more than once.

I still wasn’t sure exactly what Bug looked like. He’d once told me he was fifteen years old, but he sounded younger. Not long ago, during one of my low periods, I spent several days with X-37 reviewing my memories and his compressed files of our time on Dreadmax. We came to the conclusion that Bug and some of the other children from the security towers had made it onto the Bold Freedom.

It didn’t matter. He was probably running with street gangs on some Deadlands planet like Gronic by now.

“How are you doing, Reaper Cain?” X-37 asked. “Your biometrics indicate I should check on you.”

“I was just thinking about Bug while I roll these cigars,” I said. “You have a problem with that?”

“I have no problems, as you well know. I am here to serve, to monitor your welfare, and to maximize your performance and recovery through hormone manipulation,” X-37 said.

“Sure, but I like to pretend I can kick your ass when I’m annoyed with you,” I admitted, finishing off the last cigar of the day.

“Foul language and violence do seem to be your go-to solution for most problems,” X-37 pointed out.

Putting away my project, I left the workshop. “I can’t remember the name of the captain of the Bold Freedom. Do you think he kept the ship in one piece long enough to find a new home for innocents of Dreadmax?” I asked.

X-37 paused for an usually long time, several seconds at least. “It seems unlikely they found sanctuary. Even if they were innocent of any crime, they are a black mark against the Union. They would be rounded up and eliminated.”

X was right, I knew he was. It was naïve to think differently. The Deadlands were technically outside of the Union’s control, but there were bounty hunters and special teams to handle that sort of eventuality. The captain of the Bold Freedom wouldn’t be able to go to any known settlement.

It didn’t matter. I had my own problems to deal with.

* * *

“Jelly is asking if Tom can take a break and get some sleep,” X-37 advised me through our private channel. “She assures me that there are no actions or navigation problems requiring a human pilot to evaluate.”

“That’s fine, X. I don’t really want anyone but me changing our course anyway. The only reason I assigned Tom or Elise to the bridge was so they would learn what to do if something happens to me in the future.”

“A wise policy, Reaper Cain,” X-37 agreed.

“Cain for Jelly, can you tell me where Elise and Tom are now without violating your privacy protocols?” I asked.

“Certainly, Captain,” Jelly said. “Elise has been sleeping for almost two hours and Tom is on his way to his quarters, presumably to do the same thing. He keeps yawning. I don’t have access to his biometrics as X-37 does to yours, but evidence suggests he will be in dreamland soon.”

“Good,” I said, heading toward my new destination. “I’ll be on the observation deck. X, I want to go over the data from the storage unit we recovered from the tech shrine.”

“Of course, Reaper Cain. I have continued to decrypt the data as you requested. If you would sleep more, I would have more uninterrupted time to work on this project,” X-37 said.

“Yeah, I know. When we’re done, I’ll let you take another crack at putting me to sleep for a full six hours.” Once I was on the observation deck, I went to the small cabinet on the stern side wall and brought out a box of cigars, a bottle of whiskey, and two glasses.

I poured two fingers worth of the whiskey into one glass and put the other on the table just in case I had company. It made me feel less like an alcoholic.

Jelly, without my asking, displayed the star fields of this system. While X-37 was decrypting the data box my mother had left for us as the ultimate collection of clues, Jelly was constantly scanning the stars and trying to find reference points. We were mapping a new system far beyond the Union-controlled space, the Sarkonians’ sphere of influence, or even the Deadlands. In other circumstances, it would feel like quite an adventure.

No one was meant to come out this far.

I smoked one of the last Starbrand fakes, not really in the mood to deal with my poorly wrapped and often crumbling attempts at a homemade cigar. My inventory was dwindling. I had a few Gronic Fats I’d acquired between Greendale and Roxo III and three Starbrand Premiums.

Whiskey was easier to store and synthesize. I sipped slowly, not wanting to get too drunk or run out of booze. Private time on the observation deck was meant to be relaxing. Getting hammered wasn’t what I had in mind.

“What do we know?” I asked, confident that X-37 understood exactly what I was asking.

“In review, your mother works or worked for the Union, probably as a scientist or project leader. I conducted a side query and believe I now understand why you were unaware of your mother’s true importance at the time,” X-37 said.

“I joined the military as a teenager,” I said defensively. A sip of whiskey, a pause, and a long draw on the cigar helped me keep control of my temper.

“Of course, Reaper Cain. Cluelessness is apparently very common to teenagers. This was an obvious fact once I analyzed something tagged as social media in the archives. Nevertheless, I was challenged to find out exactly what she did for the Union. The only mistake they made in hiding her activities was erasing them completely. That in and of itself is suspicious,” X-37 said.

“It wouldn’t be noticed unless somebody with your processing power and hacking techniques was looking at the data,” I said.

“Compliment detected,” X-37 said.

“Don’t get a big head, X. Tell me more,” I demanded. The star field on the holo viewer never moved, but it was still spectacular to watch. It felt like the entire universe was looking back at me.

I tapped a few controls on my chair and moved the holo so that I was in the middle of it all.

“She left us some very formidable tools, access codes to facilities that don’t appear to exist in any record I have access to, and dossiers on people we’ve never met. There is a considerable amount of information on how to weaponize the mask and use it for a variety of missions,” X-37 said.

I thought back to the first time I had used the mask and how it nearly killed me. We had argued about why it had been designed that way and finally concluded that anyone without a limited artificial intelligence to assist them, and nerves of steel, would die if they attempted to operate it.

Byron Thane II had been an exception, because apparently my mother had contacted the angry young man and used him like a tool. He had thought he was going to kill me, but all he’d really been was a delivery tool for my mother. She’d been playing chess while the young man, the son of one of my rivals, had been playing checkers.

There had been subroutines in the operational programming significantly dumbing down control mechanisms for the mask accessible to Thane II.

The reason the mask had nearly caused me to jump into the void was that I had of course refused to read the instructions, a point that I argued, but that X-37 claimed he could prove with measurements of my eye movement at the time.

“None of this tells me what I should be doing now,” I complained. “The sooner I can rescue her, the sooner she can tell me the rest of her grand plan to thwart the Union.”

“You are assuming she is still alive,” X-37 said.

I didn’t respond, deciding that sipping what was in my glass and finishing the cigar was a better use of my time and less likely to cause me to say something I would regret.

“The first thing we need to do is avoid capture by Vice Admiral Nebs. I would advise gathering resources, establishing a safehold where we can rest and repair ourselves between engagements, and then finding where they are holding your mother and sister if either of them are in fact still alive,” X-37 said.

I stood up, cleaned the whiskey glass and the ashtray, and put them away. “I was hoping we would come up with something new.”

“It does feel like we’ve had this conversation approximately twenty-seven times,” X-37 said.

“I’m going to take a shift on the bridge,” I said.

“Perhaps you should sleep like the rest of the crew,” X-37 said.

“I’ve slept enough today.” I took my time moving to the hallway, neither looking forward to a shift on the bridge nor dreading it. The routine was easy. Travel in the slip tunnel almost never lasted longer than two or three days, but each of those jumps added up and felt like a lifetime.

Even when I was a regular soldier, life had been mostly boredom. One day after the next, there should be more than enough time to rest and figure out riddles. I was more than a bit frustrated that we hadn’t lost Nebs yet.

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