Severance (22 page)

The first Argos–wide conflict had also been the nastiest.
Whatever experience the participants of that conflict lacked in space–bound
guerrilla warfare, they made up for in exuberance. What would later be called
Argos War I occurred a little more than thirty years after the ship had
departed. The cause of this conflict was predictable to the point of being
droll: people were being jerks and not sharing. Specifically, a group of vocal
media figures and protestors began shrieking that the government was hoarding
higher quality food, resources, and living quarters for themselves and their
families. The protesters even began calling themselves ‘The Hungry’ — although
later historians would agree that label was a wild exaggeration. The government
shared a similarly low opinion of the merit of these complaints and did little
to address them. A famous political cartoon from the era depicted a large pig
in a top hat — labeled Mayor Bradley — perched atop a balcony, depositing a
large bowel movement on a group of peasants below. “Eat my shit!” the pig–mayor
says.

Eventually, a group of peasants, tired of eating shit, tried
something a little more direct. The ship had a smaller security force at the
time, with security officers and small security substations scattered
throughout the ship. When a sizable group of civilians attacked these isolated
stations simultaneously, the officers stationed there were quickly overwhelmed.
And once armed with the security weapons available at the time — dual–setting
and very lethal — the protestors weren’t shy about using them. By the time the
remaining security forces could mobilize, the protestors had seized nearly
three quarters of the ship. At that point, the rebelling faction nearly equaled
the remaining security forces in numbers, and over the next few weeks the Argos
saw a number of extraordinarily bloody, yet ultimately indecisive, engagements
between the two sides.

Thanks to either a brilliantly executed military maneuver or
a piece of blind luck, the government forces defeated the Hungry and vigorously
scrubbed the Argos’ gene–pool of their genetic legacy. Based on lessons learned
during the war, the government soon adopted some considerably different
security procedures. Almost all of the security substations throughout the ship
were shuttered, with only a single community policing center left active in the
bow, along with the main Security HQ in the aft. All officers were equipped
with stun–capable weapons only, with the bulk of the lethal weapons destroyed,
aside from a small cache kept on hand inside the main Security base.

Similar disputes about resource distribution would flare up
a couple more times in the history of the Argos, but never with the same
ferocity. Using undercover agents and a network of informants, security kept a
very tight lid on any vocally aggrieved groups that did form, and the few times
violence did break out, it was met with immediate, overwhelming force. Any
willing combatants fighting the security forces soon found that they weren’t
willing for very long.

The only other time the government of the Argos had been
seriously threatened was when Stein was a young woman. Since the ship had
launched, people had always chafed at the external approval needed before
having a child — a necessary but uncomfortable fact of life on a generation
ship. Two hundred years of bureaucratic growth has caused those restrictions to
grow bloated, cumbersome, and blatantly unfair. When Stein was just finishing
school, the fight against these restrictions was quietly taken up by a group
calling themselves the Breeders. Their cause was a popular one, at least
amongst the people who cared about things. More critically, the Breeders also
had the support of two or three high ranking people within the ship’s
government, who helped steer attention away from the fledgling group, aware of
the efforts the security forces would use to disrupt them.

Over time, the Breeders worked up the nerve to attack the
government directly, using a stockpile of homemade weaponry they had been
quietly fabricating. A group of the bravest, possibly dumbest, and certainly
angriest of the Breeders staged a ridiculously daring raid on the security
headquarters, going after the weapons cache. They were able to penetrate right
to the heart of the base without meeting any serious resistance, aided by the
use of a secret maintenance tunnel discovered by a certain Breeder sympathizer
called Laura Stein, working in her brand–new position in the maintenance
department. There, the Breeder team secured a portion of the weapons cache, only
to find themselves trapped by the security forces as they tried to retreat.

Both sides had stories about what happened next, but only one
side’s became accepted history. The way that story goes, the Breeder fighters
began using some of their newly acquired lethal weaponry to fight their way
out, killing several security officers, and thanks to their unfamiliarity with
the properties of the weapons they were handling, at least some of themselves
in the process.

That revelation pretty much killed whatever public support
there was left for the Breeders, and the handful who weren’t involved in the
violence, along with those who had escaped from the battle at the security base,
went into hiding. The witch–hunt that security enthusiastically conducted afterwards
caught some of them, but at least a few managed to escape detection, including
three of Stein’s best friends. But with their organization in pieces, the code words
and safe houses and weapon caches they had used were mothballed and left dormant.

Until now. Stretching out, Stein rolled over on the floor of
the safe house, careful to keep her cloak over her as she repositioned her cramped
limbs. “You’re sure these things will work?” she asked the shimmering lump
beside her.

“Try it and see,” the lump responded with Bruce’s voice.

Stein pulled out her terminal and instructed it to scan in
the infrared, panning it back and forth over Bruce, hidden beneath his own shimmering
infrared cloak. A bright spot appeared on the screen, glowing orange–red. “I
can see your leg.”

“Oops.” The cloak shifted. “How about now?”

“Now, I can see the top of your head. Your cloak a bit small,
champ?”

“Was that a fat joke?”

Stein laughed.

And so they waited, waiting to be hunted down, waiting to be
declared innocent, waiting for the universe to decide what to do with them.
While Bruce busied himself with the pistol and stun grenades he had dug out of
the weapons cache, Stein sat and fumed.

She had already sent a message to Sergei from a false
identity using Bruce’s rigged terminal. He hadn’t responded. She wasn’t
surprised by that. Even if he didn’t think she was a bomb–throwing anarchist,
there was little chance he would be seen talking publicly with her now. For a
few seconds, she entertained the idea that he had known about the plot the
whole time. She dismissed that idea quickly; Sergei had trusting, kind–of–dumb
eyes. If he had any secrets, they weren’t that big.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Bruce asked.

“I’m never thinking what you’re thinking, buddy. Woe be the
day that it happens.”

“Well, I’ll tell you then since you didn’t ask. I’m thinking
maybe we should do something. About this, I mean. The…the everything.” Stein
peeked under the edge of her cloak, seeing Bruce’s eyes peering back beneath
the hem of his. “We should do something about everything.”

“Assuming we’re right about the…everything,” she said. “I
don’t even know what to call it.”

“Split Plot.”

“I’m not calling it that.”

“Yeah, you will. And we are right. They are doing it.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “They are.” She thought about it for a
moment and added, “You think they’ll try again?”

“You think they won’t?” Bruce asked.

She sighed. “I guess if it was worth trying once, it’s
probably worth trying twice.”

“Okay, then,” Bruce said, satisfied. “So, they’ll try again.
Which brings me to my original question: Do we want to try and do something
about it?”

“Not much we can do under these cloaks.”

“Lots we can do under here.” Bruce punctuated the thought
with a fart.

“How do you do that on command?”

“Does it show up through the cloak?”

“Gross.”

Bruce waved his cloak around for a bit, clearing the air. “I
mean, let’s be realistic,” he said. “Doing something about it is unlikely to be
very tidy. Or conducive to living. At least knowing the methods we prefer.”

“The methods
you
prefer. And what, are you trying to
talk me out of something? Because I’m not proposing doing something about this.”

“Neither am I. I’m just trying to fill time with a
rhetorical dialog.”

“Rhetorical dialog? Where do you come up with this shit?”
she asked.

“My brain,” Bruce said. After a few moments, he continued, “So,
let’s look at the flip side. Do we want to do nothing about the Split Plot?”
Another pause, then, “You know what type of question that was?” She groaned. “Maybe
when I answer it myself you’ll figure it out.” Underneath her cloak she made a
rude gesture at him. “I mean, is it so bad that we end up on half a spaceship,
flying uncontrollably through space?” he continued.

“That’s assuming we could even survive on half a spaceship.”

“Why not? We’ve got a reactor. Fuel. Scrubbers. Recyclers.
Plenty of sexy dames and virile studs. We could keep going for centuries.”

Stein had come to the same conclusion, but still didn’t want
to admit it. “I’ll think of some reason it won’t work.”

“There’s that
can’t do
spirit I love.”

She smiled under her cloak. “Okay, how’s this: we wouldn’t
be able to stop at that planet. You know? The big one we’ve been going to this
whole time?”

She could hear Bruce exhale and roll over. “Do we even want
to stop at Tau Prius? We don’t exactly live bad lives here. You seem pretty
happy.”

Stein shook her head. “Oh, I’m happy as hell. Living and
breathing in a crappy cramped ship. Every god damned surface with a hundred
layers of human filth on it. It’s lovely.”

“I guess when you put it that way.”

“You don’t want to land?”

Bruce looked away. “No. I do. I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I mean, it’s not so bad living here. We’d die old and
happy.”

“Our descendents would freeze to death.”

“They’d be cool with that.”

Stein laughed despite herself.

She could practically hear Bruce grinning. “Okay,” he finally
said. “So, we’ll stop them, then. Fuck the bad guys, whoever they are.”

Stein laughed. “Yeah. We’ll just punch our way through a
massive, deadly conspiracy.”

“Let’s do it. Let’s kick this ship’s ass to save its ass.”

Stein smiled, enjoying their brave talk. But she could tell
that Bruce was treading dangerously close to convincing himself to do something
stupid. Madness, knowing what they were up against, Captain Helot — the
announcement of her ‘terrorist attack’ confirmed he was behind this — and
presumably the entire naval and security departments. And her goddamned boss,
that little wiener Curts. So, just the major pillars of power on the ship.
And
that little wiener Curts.
She shook her head, knowing she would have to
talk Bruce out of this before too long.

She was spared the need to pull her friend back from the abyss
by the quiet beeping noise of one of their proximity sensors. Two right hands
moved to two pistols, both she and Bruce fumbling with their weapons and terminals,
checking to see who was coming.

§

“I got a hit,” Croutl said over the commlink. “A machine
shop at…4825 Slate.”

“What’s the IR say?” Hogg called back.

“One person, I think. It’s weak though. I think he’s pretty
far back in there.”

“Or she. Okay. Set up across the street. Cover the front
door.” He looked at the map on the terminal. “Linze, take your team to the
entrance in the hall around back.” Linze acknowledged his order, while Hogg
signaled his own unit to follow.

Only one of them. He wasn’t sure whether Stein and Redenbach
would split up or not. Maybe. But it was also just as likely they were dealing
with another Fauxmless.

Hogg led his team down the block, setting up a short
distance away from where the machine shop was. Croutl, Petronus, and Deek had
taken up position behind two packing crates across the street. He approached
the main door, a double–wide, checking his own IR sensor. There. A strange
figure in the back of the warehouse, prone. It was human, but something was
obstructing part of it. Only a pair of legs was clearly visible. Just as he was
about to shut his IR off, he spotted something else, a patch of blue,
unnaturally darker than everything else. It was hard to make out, backgrounded
by another wall, almost as cool. But it was definitely there. The patch seemed
to shift and shimmer as he looked at it.

“I count one man in there, with a possible camouflaged
second,” he whispered into the radio. “Okay. Full breach, everyone. Linze, take
position.” He gestured his team members to positions on either side of the
entry door. “Croutl, keep your team outside to cover us. Linze, ready?”

“Ready.”

“Five, four, three, two, one, now.”

Hogg tapped the access pad with his ungloved hand.
Recognizing him as a security officer, the door slid open.

§

“Security!” someone shouted. “Security! Put your hands up!”

Behind her, gunfire, Bruce shooting wildly. That was the
plan — he would cover one door, she would cover the other. But she couldn’t
move, all muscles locked in place out of terror. Security officers streamed in
the door she was supposed to be covering, shooting, stun shots sailing over her
head in the direction of Bruce. A bright flash of light and a thud behind her.
The officers in front of her ducked, blinded, having missed the brunt of what
she guessed was a stun grenade. They were less fortunate when the second
grenade exploded on her left, scattering them like leaves.