Chapter 6 - The Book of Revelations
Bethany. 3
Oh, Jesus, she needed that. She sighed heavily as the bitter nectar of the gods - otherwise known as coffee - slid down her throat. Day and night were concepts that didn't really translate well to space travel; mankind had evolved to be reliant on the rising and setting of the sun to govern their sleep cycles. The Pineal gland in the human brain would respond to the lowering light of dusk and release Melatonin - the sleep hormone - into the bloodstream, telling the body that it was time to rest. Well, there was no sun in space, at least not a rising or setting one, and changing the ambient lighting on her ship according to the time of day was not only counter-productive but generally ineffective. The only means of telling the time was by literally looking at a clock.
Over the years, she had fallen into something approaching a thirty-hour day schedule. She would sleep for about ten hours, work for about fifteen, and, dotted throughout the day, would have about five hours to herself. This absolutely didn't work on most planets, but almost the entirety of Bethany's life was spent in space, so that didn't really matter. To be honest, the time on her vambrace didn't really matter either. It didn't matter what time it was when she got up, only how much sleep she had gotten before it. The actual time was little more than an indicator of its passage rather than anything to run your life by. Like practically every other starship captain, her clock was set to Imperium standard time, which was Greenwich Mean Time in London, on Earth. The time in one planetary city had no bearing on anything at all outside of that city, but an interstellar bureaucracy had to function on a universal time constant, and GMT was as good a time as any. According to her computer, it was 4:32am in London, and for the first time in a long time, that is exactly what it felt like.
Mornings - the part of the day just after she woke up - sucked, no matter what time of the day that actually happened. It didn't matter if she had been blessed with a full ten hours of solid sleep or if she had struggled to nod off as she had the night before; a single existential truth of her life was that mornings would be infinitely easier if they happened later in the day. Morning people scared and confused her, and she absolutely refused to trust anyone who could pretend to enjoy feeling like she felt now.
On the other hand, there was coffee.
Dick called her coffee "Jet fuel" due to the apparently insane amounts of caffeine in it, but she was starting to consider upping the dosage anyway. She wasn't getting the same kick out of it as she used to, and - as she aged in that inevitable way that all people did - she was starting to need that kick more and more often. She sighed again as she gulped down another mouthful of that black boiling liquid. She liked her coffee like she liked her men, she had once joked to Dick. Dick had eyed the milkless black liquid and then arched an eyebrow at her. "Hot and silent," she had clarified with a grin.
She stretched her body, rolling her shoulders and trying to fight away the last reminders of sleep as she leaned her ass against the edge of the kitchen counter. The Long Haul's galley wasn't anything particularly impressive; she was sure that other Captains had more elaborate setups on their own ships, but this suited her fine. She wasn't much of a cook; toiling for hours over intricately prepared meals was not something she had time for, nor something she particularly enjoyed. Food, to her, was fuel, and cooking it was a chore that needed to be done, no different from purging the air filters or cleaning the bathrooms. Some fuel was nicer than others, but it all did the same job, and all of it ended up in said bathrooms eventually. She didn't know what the term was for someone who was the opposite of a foodie, but she was sure there was one. Dick was rather insistent that the correct term was 'philistine' and had tried to convert her to the dark side of gluttony by preparing meals of truly extravagant quality for her. "Now, can you taste the difference in this?" he would ask, handing her a sample of... something... that was apparently cooked slightly differently than the last something he had given her.
"Not really," was usually her inevitable, honest reply. After a few months, Dick had decided that her taste buds just didn't work properly and had given up.
The galley was essentially a few kitchen counters, a stove, an oven, and a microwave. Hundreds of years of technical innovation and aside from how those appliances were powered, they had hardly changed since their invention. The coffee machine was the only contraption within it that held any sort of meaning for her, and even then, only in the mornings. The rest of the room contained a small table, a few chairs, a bunch of sofas, and a large holo-screen against one corner, good for watching movies or the odd news bulletin. It was currently off.
That was probably for the best. The promise of war had been the thing that had stopped her from sleeping properly the night before. Not the death, carnage, and destruction; that could usually be avoided, but the things that came with it. Refugees stowing away on her ship could cause damage to internal components, tariffs would inevitably increase to fund the war effort, ships being diverted away from fringe systems would lead to an increase in piracy, plus there was always the chance of one side thinking that she was working for the other and outright impounding her ship... or worse, blowing it up. But mainly, it was the vast tract of space that would become a no-fly zone. The problems that would cause for anyone trying to make a living were incalculable.
For a moment, she realized how callous and heartless she sounded, saying it like that. It's not that the destruction of entire fleets and whole colonies - not to mention the horrific numbers of dead that came with them - didn't play on her mind. They did. She was appalled at the bloodlust and enthusiasm for war being shown by the Imperium News Network, but they seemed like an almost fact of life in the Imperium, whereas the things bothering her would be the things that would plague her own life for the foreseeable future, even if she somehow managed to get through the whole thing unscathed. She could see it happening. The process of demonizing and dehumanizing the rebels had long been underway, but to see those efforts pay off in such an extraordinary fashion in that bar had been... troubling. With each new news segment on the preparations for war, the INN would run a few pieces about common people supporting the actions of their government. "Oh, yes," the bleached blonde bimbo on the screen would say, "I totally, like, think the rebels should all be killed. That's what we do to traitors, right?" and then the smart man in a business suit would be interviewed. "Any form of dissension is damaging to the markets; the outer colonies have never understood that. Now they've rebelled against the core worlds and are carrying out cowardly terrorist attacks? That's too far. They need to be stopped." There were whole streams of this utter horseshit.
Normally, Bethany would roll her eyes, take it as the propaganda that it clearly was, and get on with her day. But she had been in that bar when the news was announced; she had seen the reactions of the people around her. Those had been ordinary people, not paid props, and they had been baying for blood. That reaction could be scaled up to a truly terrifying level if the response was the same in every bar on every street corner, in every town in the Imperium. So much so that she had to genuinely wonder if the 'paid props' were just propaganda tools at all. With such overwhelming support for the war, the government would be free to do just about anything without having to worry about the fickle tide of public opinion. But unlike her, ordinary people had never seen a planet under siege, they had never smelled the dark decay of death, they had never heard the shrill screams of agony and anguish; they had never seen war. She had. It was a long-established fact that the quickest way to end a war was to allow the people to see the reality of it, and the Imperium would spare no expense on keeping the more grisly scenes far away from the viewing public. She was sure there would be a few fluff pieces from a reporter "embedded" with the military, but she doubted the general population would see anything more than what the government wanted them to see. She, on the other hand, got her news from sources much closer to the action because they were usually the ones who paid the most for what she was hauling.
She had never met anyone who outrightly professed to be a rebel, but she had been to the outer colonies a number of times, and she knew that they had genuine reason to be pissed at the Imperium. They weren't traitors, or terrorists, or monsters; they were just people trying to make their way in life, and yet, if the INN was to be believed, they were all heavily armed, disgruntled psychopaths with nothing better to do than murder peaceful core-world citizens in their beds without a moment's hesitation.
The worst part about it all was that it was working. She had shut the morning news off halfway through a report on how military recruitment was up five-fold in all sectors; she imagined that was an underestimation. The propaganda ministry would have wanted to shame young men and women for not signing up while not putting them off, thinking that all the spots had already been filled.
There was only so much bullshit you could wade through before it got to be too much.
Who the fuck knew. Maybe she was the only one who could see it; maybe they put something in the water on Imperium worlds to make people more susceptible to that kind of nonsense, or maybe all of it was in her head. Either way, it was not making her sleep - and by extension, her mornings - any easier, and
that
was damned near unforgivable.
She drained the last of her mug, cast another glance at the silent screen, and headed toward the bridge to check on their progress. It had been a week since they had left Port Collins, and they were making good time through the Hudson expanse. If all went according to plan, they should arrive at the capital in about three more days, easily inside of the fourteen-day window for the bonus payment. She also had a buyer for the Rigellian Rum, too; with all the new ships being pumped out of the Imperium shipyards, anything that could fill in for the remarkably rare Earth Champagne to be used in their christenings was being snapped up at extortionate rates, her rum included.
That brought something of a smile to her face as she navigated her way toward the cockpit. The money she would make off this run could fund the much-needed and long-overdue upgrades to her ship. The Long Haul was a pretty standard medium bulk cargo freighter, and its layout was more or less the same as most others: the cockpit up front, a very small passenger bay just behind that - a fancy way of saying there were some jump seats bolted to the walls just outside the cockpit door, - then the first set of ladders that dropped down to the cargo bay. The next rooms were the airlocks - one on each side - and then the crew cabins, with hers on the left and Dicks on the right. The passageway opened up into the galley and lounge areas after that, before the rest of the upper deck was swallowed up by the engine room. Basically, everything of importance was back there, from the engines and FTL drive to the power core and the shield generators. There were also small indentations at the back of the galley for two more ladders down to the cargo bay. The cargo bay, by comparison, was enormous. It was five times the height of the upper deck and ran the entire length of the Long Haul.
It wasn't a big ship, but at four hundred meters long, it wasn't small either. Engineering took up well over half of that upper deck space, though, leaving the remaining habitable area for the crew feeling... compact. She couldn't bring herself to call it small; it was homely. What that meant, however, was that you could always tell, just by the noises around the ship, where the other crew members were. In this case, there was only Dick, but Dick was silent. She frowned as she headed past the doors to the crew cabins, only to hear a soft thud from below.
Her eyebrows furrowed a little deeper. Once the cargo was secured in the hold, there was next to no reason for anyone to go down there until approaching the drop-off point. If anything, the yawning, chasmous cargo bays were probably the least hospitable place on the ship, with barely enough lighting to navigate it safely and only enough heat to stop things from freezing, and yet there had been a few times over the past week when she had been laying in bed and could have sworn she heard something moving around down there. At the time, she had shrugged it off as a healthy spacefarer's imagination, tales from her childhood of space monsters stowing away on unsuspecting haulers, only to feast on the equally unsuspecting crew when they were conveniently furthest from help. She had even chuckled to herself, but - on top of the unexplained noises in the night - this would have been the third time she had caught Dick emerging from the hold, and both previous times had been explained away with a need for cleaning supplies. Dick was a decent shipmate and a hard-working crewman, but he had never struck her as particularly OCD when it came to cleanliness. She'd seen his quarters; his new-found neatness certainly didn't extend to there.
