| |
LENA DREAMED. IT WAS different than the worlds that she and the ship seemed to create together. That all seemed to have coherence to it. In her dreams, it seemed like there were no rules and no control. Mostly that wasn’t too awful, she didn’t feel, hunger or pain and any dreams she had, though surreal, weren’t scary. Until the dream about the joggers.
If there was a nightmare prevention circuit that Rowie employed to prevent nightmares when Lena was dreaming, it wasn’t being used now. Should she be more worried by a distracted Rowie or the potential of a neglectful Rowie? She spent most of her time trying not to think too much about the amount of power this ship had over all of them, instead preferring to think of her relationship like that with a friendly and intelligent dog, like some kind of space Labrador. But even a Labrador could turn on an inexperienced trainer or owner. Lena wasn’t sure the relationship she had with Rowie was either of those. The ship was her own person, a very alien, very intelligent person. She hoped that Rowie was also a kind person, she seemed to be, but how ever was it possible to tell?
A massive leering face was in her way. Fazar the first officer. His stubbly jaw almost brushing her face. He was staring right at her, pinning her to her bunk. She opened her mouth to scream, he mimicked her motion for motion, and the scream died in her throat. Not so, his though. He built up an angry, demanding scream from deep in the bowels of him, slowly building in volume. Lena felt tears prickle her eyes, then the giant head turned sharply and started shouting names: “Smith! Bones! Baradun! Thompson! Rodriguez! Killarney! Leonard! Brian! Sergeant! Get your idle legs running! Go! Go! Go!” If it was a dream, it was realistic—she felt flecks of spittle hit her face. He slid from view as quickly as he’d arrived and the people he was shouting at, ran past him. Nine people of various size, all wearing the same sand-coloured combat trousers and boots. Five were stripped to the waist, four wore a grey kind of sports support top. All of them had close-cropped hair. These were the joggers from her park. What on earth was the ship trying to tell her? Who the crew were? She’d met some of them and liked most of them. Except the horrible first officer. But she already knew about him, she could do without dreams reminding her.
Lena wondered if she could choose who to dream about. She pictured Jenny the Chief Engineer. In her mind the red hair and quick tongue were massive. Dream Jenny was tinkering in her engineering area. The room wasn’t empty exactly, but various mushrooms, plinths and ‘consoles’ flowered as she arrived and degenerated once she’d finished interacting with them. Was Lena seeing what was really going on there? Was there more to it in Jenny’s mind? What kind of an engine-room was she imagining? Was the tinkering there doing anything at all, it seemed from the feel of the room that Rowie was enjoying the attention. The control areas glowed pink or gold as Jenny moved her fingers lightly across them. Did her interactions do anything to alter how the ship powered or steered? The rapid bloom and decay of the controls started to make Lena feel nauseous, she looked away to find somewhere else.
In the ‘hold’ were stacked crates of supplies, along with lockers of uniforms and space suits. An officer stood with an old-school digital pad. Lena didn’t know what his job was, she’d not met him in all the bustle of them escaping from Earth. He had two junior crew members working for him in powered equipment moving suits. It was difficult to tell what sex the two crew were in the massive suits. They worked to the instruction of their boss, who ticked things off on the pad as they went. Behind the highest tower of boxes were two smaller space faring vehicles. One was a small shuttle craft, a flattened, blunted cone in shape that would maybe take three or four crew. The other looked slightly more robust, was a full ten metres in length and though it was largely a stretched long version of its hold-mate, it had stubby wings, which led Lena to believe that of the two craft, that would be the one that could perform atmospheric manoeuvres. It seemed that the soldier/joggers, for all their strutting and marching, didn’t have transport of their own, the two in the hold were clearly marked with HMSS designations.
Where was Uncle Richie? He didn’t do a great deal of physical affection, but she’d settle for him scruffing her hair right now, as much as it annoyed her. She felt the bed around her warm up and glow pink. Was that Rowie giving her a hug? This was genuinely the oddest friend she’d ever had.
Now she was aware of a small square room, off the bridge, that the captain used as a ready room. Captain Varma sat on the little mushroom stool that the ship generated, behind the organic shaped desk: the broad top was flat and wider than it was deep and all of it came from the floor on a neat stem. Lena suspected that, like her, the captain very much saw things how they were, rather than how she wanted them to be. Could she communicate with Rowie? Would it be possible for anyone else? So many questions. It didn’t look like Captain Varma could handle many more questions right now, she had her face in her hands from an onslaught of questions or discussion from both the doctor and Uncle Richie. It wasn’t an argument, both Doctor Fuller and Uncle Richard were nice people, but the discussion was something heavy. Or it was the final straw for the most stressful week for the captain? Lena realised that they’d all moved when her awareness came back into focus. The corridor they were in led to her room. She heard the door to her room hiss as the pressure equalised and felt her ears pop.
The three grown-ups had all come and they filled her room. The doctor busied himself with reattaching his cuff thing to her arm and waited for it to work. The captain loomed over her, though she could only feel that and smell that tiny amount of the rich floral smell that seemed to follow her. She knew her eyes were tight shut as certainly as she knew exactly where everyone was.
Uncle Richard startled her by gently stroking her head, in a way quite unlike him. It did not stop him having a conversation at the same time.
“What is Fazar up to?” asked Richard.
“I don’t know. That’s why we’re talking about it in here rather than anywhere else. I suspect this is the safest room on the ship now Lena’s in here,” the captain replied.
“She’s still within the new parameters,” The doctor sounded unusually worried. Everyone was behaving strangely.
“I wonder if he’s got different instructions from the Admiralty to the rest of us?” said Richard.
“Damn,” said Varma, “I was hoping you might already know that and could shed some light. Clearly not.”
“No-one tells me anything,” said Richard. “‘Take your new bright idea out, shake out any bugs, try not to get anyone killed,’ were the admiral’s exact words to me.”
“And then he delivers a small army, to the first officer, without telling anyone else.”
“Hardly an army, there are only nine of them.”
“Nine highly trained and well-armed marines are nine more than I’ve ever had on a ship before and it bothers me, Richard.” Captain Varma and her uncle seemed to be on first name terms now. That was nice, she liked the captain.
“Are they well-armed?”
“They’ve re-organised the bloody cargo bay again to do drills with whatever they have got. When I asked Fazar what he was doing he said, ‘it was on a need-to-know basis’. Cheeky bastard.”
“I hope you had him up on a charge,” said the doctor.
“No. Satisfying though that would be, I’m keeping my powder dry on that one. I need to know a little more about what he’s up to first before I fire a warning shot.”
“I hope none of it comes to shots,” said the doctor.
Lena was sad she wasn’t awake to make the appropriate joke about doctors and shots.
