Chapter 1: Presumptions

There he stood, the arrogant war hero, straddling the hatch between the flight deck and the bridge, self-satisfied smile, like some smug Greek god. He reached up and rapped his knuckles on the inner hull of the ship.

He always claimed it was superstition, but Shelley Carson felt that he did it to draw attention to himself.

“He really is an arrogant prick, isn’t he?” Shelley spoke softly so only her partner in hydroponics, Sumin Lee, would hear her.

“He’s competent at his job.“ Sumin shrugged off Shelley’s snark, tapped the screen in front of them. The graphs showed much more red than green. “If we can’t solve this, we’re the ones that are doing poorly.”

Still, Shelley watched as commander Jeffery Carter looked down both sides of the bridge, apparently contemplating which stairway he would take from the catwalk to the floor of the bridge.

As Shelley expected, Carter turned to his right and bobbed down those stairs, one slow low-g step at a time. Going to his left would’ve meant having to talk to her. Shelley wasn’t sure she could keep a civil tongue.

This close to the historic mission, the rumor was that Carter was determined to shake up the crew. She might not be on the chopping block yet, but she knew for sure that Thomas was.

Shelley heard Carter shout some kind of compliment into the computer cave. It was Thomas who replied, curtly. Shelley noted that Carter didn’t bother speaking after that, instead talking to the engineers further down that side of the bridge. If Jennifer Trent, Thomas’ boss, had answered instead of Thomas, there probably would’ve been a full, flirty conversation, arrogance multiplied.

Sumin kept trying to get Shelley’s attention. “Look, I don’t know what poisoned your working relationship with him, but get your head in the game. You’ve got to be as good at your job as he is at his.”

“Who can live up to,” Shelley made air quotes. “The war hero?”

Sumin sighed. “That may have gotten him into the programme, just like how our research got us here. The difference is that here, now, he’s succeeding and we’re not. This is the only department that still has red on our boards. I don’t want to go home. I’ve given up too much to lose this now. Don’t you screw this up for me.”

= = =

When Jeffery Carter returned to the cockpit with two coffee bulbs, he saw his pilot, Michelle Patterson, deep in thought, staring at a screen. Jeff thought he was familiar with all the screens, but this one was new.

Michelle waved off the coffee, so he attached it to her cup holder and slid back into his seat. “OK, what’d we do wrong this time?” He asked, expecting a litany of minor transgressions.

From his perspective, the shakedown trial had gone remarkably well. This last cruise, they had orbited Jupiter; proven their shuttle skills by replenishing the Europa orbital station; and looped around Neptune before circling back in toward Earth again.

Various scenarios, emergencies and glitches, all contrived by mission control, had been handled competently. The newly-installed singularity-based gravity system had functioned admirably under all conditions.

And notably, not a single fight broke out among the crew.

Jeff was most surprised by the latter. Michelle, Bill, Thomas – there were a lot of hotheads in this crew. He hoped his pilot hadn’t noticed his side-eye as he thought that.

“Nothing wrong that I can see,” She replied.

“So why are you deep in that…” He leaned over to better see what she was reading. “Gravitational Array Diagnostic screen?”

“I keep waiting for it to happen.”

“What? What to happen?”

“Whatever they’re planning.” Michelle looked up from the screen for the first time. She hit a switch that sealed the flight deck from the rest of the bridge. Jeff felt the slight rumble of the hatch sliding, the ambient noise behind them falling off.

“I mean, the easiest way would be a failure of the magnetic array. Let loose that little singularity, tear us all apart. ‘Oops, new tech had a flaw. Who knew?’” Michelle, who always spoke her mind, let her words trail off. There was something she wanted to say, but wasn’t sure she should. Jeff waited, not speaking.

“We’re nobody’s ideal crew.” Michelle finally continued. “If anything, we’re the last people who should be here.”

“I…” Jeff wasn’t sure if he should be more offended for himself or for the others. They’d all worked so damn hard, sacrificed so much, to get selected. “We’re very competent. We’ve each gone through serious hoops to get here.”

“Not true, not at all. Not true for Janelle. Not true for Henri, Not true for Marc.” She took a deep breath, In for a penny, in for a pound. “You were absolutely no one’s first choice for commander of this mission. You’re the unwanted poster boy for a war that everyone wants to forget. It’s no secret that you’ve got anger issues, and possibility undiagnosed PTSD. No,” She cut off Jeff’s question. “Marc didn’t tell me that, it’s my own judgement. You’re a loose cannon on a short fuse, a liability.”

“They wouldn’t promote you in the navy, but you were this big war hero. They had to be seen to be rewarding you, somehow. So they side-promoted you to the space program: Captain of a nuclear sub to commander of an experimental starship.”

Jeff grimaced. There was some truth to the idea that his own navy saw him as a liability, despite his accomplishment. No one had pushed him, per se, but there had been a long line of people encouraging his jump.

Certainly, no one had been sad to see him go.

“I’m not loved,” Michelle exaggerated a shrug. “The social dial is swinging back towards patriarchy. There’s no room for an uppity female test pilot who asks too many questions. I should’ve died more than once, and they’d have been happier that way.”

“Greg?” Jeff asked. “He invented half the technology that we’re using.”

“First, he’s tapped out. He’s gone from inventing to lecturing. Second, he’s been at odds with Doctor Valesco, and all the military-industrial types who back him, for a long time. All of Greg’s campaigning against weaponising this tech…I’ve heard there were attempts on his life – not just threats, understand, but actual attempts.”

“Is this one of these deep state conspiracy theories? A ‘There’s a shadow cabal actually ruling the world’ thing?”

Michelle ignored both the tone and the levity of Jeff’s reply.

“If the Santa Maria had a catastrophic accident, the governing council would get rid of you, me, Greg, and they could blame us for our own deaths, because anyone who might actually object is here, onboard.” She paused for a moment. “Would your ex-wife fight to clear your name?”

“No, she’d take the benefits and never look back. But Janelle would, vigourously.”

“And suddenly she’s transferred here. She’s not qualified to be here – sorry, but that’s true – And even if she were, we don’t need a medic when they’ve already assigned a full flight surgeon to the crew. And he, by the way, is the only one who’d fight to clear my name.” She ticked her fingers. “So, you, me, Janelle and Marc. The government’s gotten everything they need from Greg, now he’s just a political liability. Jennifer? You know how much her media-influencer status pisses off the bosses. I mean she’s good, but not as good as her followers would have you believe. There were any number of candidates just as good.” He had to nod at that. “Thomas? You’ve been planning to ditch him as soon as you can submit our three-sixty evals. No one’s going to cry over Thomas, well, except for Shelley, and surprise, surprise, she’s here, too, screwing up the hydroponics.”

“So, if something bad happens to this ship…?”

“We are a ship of disposable people. The only question is how they can maximize the value of our deaths. A catastrophic accident would allow them to shut down, or at least delay, the whole program, maybe retool it as a purely military project. All at the cost of one aging prototype and a bunch of losers.”

“That’s a very dark take.” Jeff looked at his screen. The three-sixty evals were top of list. Should he even bother?

“I mean, I could be wrong.” Michelle conceded. “But I’m checking everything twice, very carefully. I like living.”