Here Be Dragons (9 page)

Vijay said nothing, but raised his coffee in the air. They drank the toast in silence.

“Nobody leaves the core without a helmet,” Elena said. “I see anybody on deck without a cover and it’s a night in the brig.”

“We have a brig?”

“I’ll build one.”

She drained the last of her coffee and felt it burn.

“The memorial service will be today. Right after the next shift change, so the crew can still get some sleep.”

Vijay nodded.
Gabriel
was not equipped to store corpses. There was nothing remotely like a morgue on board, and nobody wanted to test the air filters with decomposition. And it wouldn’t do for morale to let the crew report to the medical office for muscle therapy, knowing that Arnaud was still lying inside the surgical suite, tied down with a plastic sheet. The sooner it were done, the better.

“And someone will have to get Suarez and Makarim out of the medical office so they can attend.”

“I’ll talk to Golus,” Vijay said. “God knows you have had enough trouble for one day.”

Vijay got up to leave.

“Wait,” Elena said.

He turned again.

“Sit back down.”

Vijay floated back to his chair, eyebrows knitted.

“It’s just that, speaking of Golus…chucha, don’t look at me right now.”

“Fine, fine.”

He turned to ostentatiously face the wall.

“Earlier, when I was in therapy today. We joked about it. We joked about an attack.”

Elena could see the muscles in Vijay’s neck tense as he told himself not to turn and look at her.

“You did.” He wasn’t asking.

“Yes. It’s stupid, I know. It’s just...hablando del Rey de Roma, por la puerta asoma.”

“I never knew you to be superstitious,” Vijay said.

“I’m not. I’m not religious either, but if I really did speak of the devil and he rang my doorbell, I’d take my vowsthe next chance I go.”

Vijay rotated so that he was facing her once more.

“Have I ever told you about old man Sanjay? From the camps?”

Elena shook her head. They knew a lot about each other, but not everything.

“I was maybe five or six years old when he first started coming around. No one knew where came from originally. It was certainly not Mumbai, to judge by his awful Marathi, but he spoke English as if he were lord of the manor. He sold little trinkets, things that he collected from the forbidden zone. He was a scavenger, of course.”

Elena nodded, and wondered where this could be going.

“Now there is no shame in being a scavenger. God only knows that there was no work on any kind in that part of the world, in those days. Retrieving valuable and not-so-valuable objects from what was left of Mumbai? That was a public service to my way of thinking, even if he did sell them on the black market. My own mother was a scavenger, as you know. She had walked, pregnant, barefoot, and bleeding, over fifty kilometers to the refugee camp to give birth to Nishtha and myself. Any woman who could do such a thing could hold her head high among kings and queens, and to hell with anyone who says different.”

Elena nodded. She did know this part. Vijay’s mother had died the next day, of radiation poisoning. She had probably been drinking the wrong water. Little Vijay had come out with five fingers and five toes on his four perfect little limbs. His twin sister Nishtha had been given three arms, two hearts, and only one week to live outside the womb. The Global Union doctor who had delivered them had euthanized her, despite the Treaty’s ban on eugenics. Vijay had never known his father and never learned his family name, and had instead taken his sister’s as his own.

“Sanjay was a scavenger as well, and a good one. But that sort of work took its toll, and old man Sanjay paid the price in tumors. He was covered in them. We could see them when he bathed in the river, great bloody tumors all over his body. He even had them on his face, one the size of a walnut hanging from his cheek. They were benign, of course. He never would have survived as long as he did otherwise. But they were hard to miss, and children being children…There were names. And stones, occasionally. The peacekeepers would put a stop to it if they could—they did business with Sanjay, just like everybody else—but they couldn’t be everywhere at once, not in the camps. I am not proud of what…I am not proud of the things that were said to that man. Or done.”

Elena carefully kept her face blank as Vijay looked away, towards the maps beside her desk.

“So on. I grew older and needed to find work for myself, and one way or another I ended up working for Sanjay. I never went into the forbidden zone myself, he would not hear anything of it. I would camp outside—I was about twelve at this time—close enough that nobody else came by, but far enough to still drink the water. I would wait for him while he walked into the ruins. When he came out I would hide whatever he had found near my campsite, until we had nearly too much for the two of us together. And then we would walk back to the camp. We rarely spoke.”

Elena had never been to a forbidden zone, but she had seen them from orbit countless times, scattered across Asia and North America. Most of them would be hot for decades, settled only by the wilderness. Her ancestors had been fortunate. Her own country had been untouched by the nukes, and suffered only their aftermath.

“This went on for a year or two. And then one night, halfway between Mumbai and the camp, I worked up the nerve to ask: Why did he not just get the bloody things removed? The Union doctors probably would have done it for free, that was the sort of thing for which they had come. And he asked me why I thought it was, that out of all the scavengers in the camp, he was favored above all others? It was true. Sanjay did excellent business, and the peacekeepers let him alone. Even the highwaymen would actually buy our wares, instead of stealing them.”

Vijay was still facing Elena, but he was no longer looking at her—he had gone blank the way one does when talking on the phone and imagining the person at the other end. She could almost see Sanjay reflected in his eyes.

“He told me that when a man was as lumpy and ugly as he was, he had proven himself to be the genuine article. He was no piker. You saw those bloody great tumors, and you knew that this was a scavenger who had done the job for a long time, and done it well. Sanjay had earned his stripes, so to speak. They were badges of honor, and he would no more cast them aside than a prince would his crown, or a beggar his bowl.”

Vijay leaned back in the chair, one foot hooked around the legs. He was smiling slightly.

“I had been working for Sanjay for months and months, but this was the first time that I thought I truly knew him. I felt that his wisdom required some reflection, and back then I did my best thinking as I smoked. So I rolled a cigarette, and as I felt that we were now companions, I offered Sanjay the first pull. And do you know what he said to me?”

She shook her head on cue.

“‘No thank you, son. Those fucking things give you cancer.’”

Elena burst into laughter, and immediately put a hand to her mouth.

“Oh, mi dio. I’m sorry. That’s terrible.” She giggled again.

“Yes, it is.” Vijay grinned. “But to hell with it. Why should he have not joked about it, as much as he had suffered? I saw plenty of people die in the camps. There was pneumonia every winter, heat stroke every summer, starvation for every season. The first girl I kissed died of diarrhea when she was only twelve years old. The first boy I kissed was beaten and drowned in the river. Elena, if you want to whistle past the graveyard, I will be happy to play you a tune.”

She smiled. He hardly ever used her first name.

“Talk to Golus, make the arrangements,” she said. “And inform the crew.”

Vijay saluted.

“Aye, Captain.”

“And thank you.”

She returned his salute, and Vijay turned to leave. He was nearly at the door when she asked the question.

“How did Sanjay die?”

Vijay stopped at the threshold, but didn’t turn around.

“I am not certain. He went into the zone one night when I was sixteen, and as far as I know, he never came back out.”

“Did you hold a funeral for him?”

“I did. I even built a headstone, and carved it as well as I could. But his true grave is wherever he fell.”

An empty grave—just like the one that Arnaud’s next of kin would gather around on Earth.

“Walk with me for a moment.”

The damage-control team had worked fast—the breach in the port hull had already been sealed and the compartment repressurized, and the disabled utility trunks in the outer hull had been rerouted. The missile body was still embedded in the armor on the other side of the bulkhead, but there was nothing that could be done about that until they returned to port in Union territory. Here and there were dents and gouges in the walls where bits of shrapnel had bit into
Gabriel’s
insides. Elena approached the breach and ran her hand over the discolored patch on the outer bulkhead which had, just a few hours before, been a gaping wound in
Gabriel’s
side
.

“I have already prepared the report for Control,” Vijay said. He spoke quietly, and Elena could barely hear him over the clanking and whirring of the machinery embedded in the hull around her. That noise had always been there, but it had been months since Elena had noticed it. She only heard it when it wasn’t there. “We are waiting for you to sign off before we transmit.”

“He had family?”

“A mother and sister, Fredaline and Serafina. Both of Port-au-Prince.”

She nodded. No children, thank God.

“We’ll want to send a message to them as well.”

“Of course.”

Together they left the breach and went to the hatchway where Arnaud had died. It was open and inviting, and the atmospheric monitor was now entirely green.

“I am sorry to insist,” Vijay said, “but you have yet to answer my question.”

“Which was?”

His eyes were on the panel beneath the monitor, and the door handle which lay beneath it.

“Would you have done anything differently?”

Arnaud had made a choice, but he wasn’t the only one. The ship’s log showed that someone in compartment P-10 had requested a manual override of the quarantine—and that the bridge had refused it.

“We’d been breached, and for all you knew we were still under attack,” Elena said. “There was no way to tell if you’d be exposing more of the crew. What you did was well within regulation.”

“Was it what you would have done?”

“Yes,” she lied. Elena checked her bracelet and sighed, though the shift change was nearly seven hours away. “I have to review that report,” she said. “You’ll speak to the doctor?”

“Leave it to me, Captain,” Vijay said.

She floated to the topside hatch to return to her quarters, and left him alone at the grave site.

Back in her stateroom, she found his report to be accurate and concise—Vijay had praised the bridge staff and deck crew for their quick responses, and he had unflinchingly owned up to keeping the compartment locked down with two of his crew inside. Elena added a section of her own as the first responder, and signed off on it. But before it could go out, she had to write the message to Arnaud’s family. Elena sat at her desk, his personnel file open on one screen, a blank page on the other.

Ten minutes later, it was still blank. She consulted the computer and found nothing in the Space Agency guidelines other than a boilerplate notification letter. But the vast majority of deaths in the service were accidental, and the form made no mention of courage in the face of the enemy or selfless devotion to duty, or any of the pretty words that she had expected. It was as if the Agency had forgotten that it was fighting a war.

Elena called up a new personnel record. Unlike her, Captain Muller never cut her red hair short, and even in an unflattering file photo it managed to catch the light and shimmer. And also unlike her, the commanding officer of
Archangel
had never had to write any letters to the families of the forty four men and women who had served under her. She’d gone down with them.

Elena stared at the photo for a moment. Then she bent her head and began to write.

The Agency didn’t commission chaplains.
Gabriel
was the largest ship in its fleet, and it was still too crowded to take on anyone who didn’t wear at last two hats aboard ship, and preferably more. Even the stewards, the lowliest hands on deck, were trained in emergency medicine and damage control. And if a chaplain had the acumen to serve in a more technical role, the Global Union’s multitudinous religions would make seeing to everyone’s spiritual needs an endless problem. The faithful saw to their own devotions.

But Arnaud could not perform the last rites himself. Nor could he deliver his own eulogy. For the first time since she had stopped attending mass in protest of the schismatic behavior of her parents—her father had stayed in the Catholic Church while her mother had followed the nuns into the Parochial Church, and their daughter had gone to each in turn, one every other Sunday—Elena wished that she had a priest.

They lined the walls of the cramped corridor, dozens of men and women in either direction, come to heed the call:
All hands bury the dead
. There would be no grand ceremony.
Gabriel
had no flags to lower, and no firing party to salute him. His mates in the steward department had already made their remarks, and left their tokens of respect inside his graveclothes—nothing more than a pair of disposable antiseptic sheets wrapped round his nude form and sewn together. Each spacesuit cost as much as what a Third Officer made in a year, and they had seen no sense in jettisoning a perfectly good spare. Someone had found a paintbrush, and scrawled two flags on the sheet—the black and white Agency ensign, and the red and blue Haitian flag.

Arnaud had been a Catholic as well, and a search of his footlocker had turned up a small, gilt-edge Bible. Elena turned it in her hands. She had no idea what to say. She had been too preoccupied with the report and letter, and finding a few precious hours of sleep, to think much about it at all. She had not even known who to ask. Elena hadn’t been to a funeral since she’d laid Anne to rest a few years before. She would never have guessed then that she would preside over the next one she attended.