Derelict

[Sarah McFarlen]

10th July 822 – Interplanetary Space, Coronado

---

Five days burning, and Sarah McFarlen was the most alone she had ever been. Barrier Gate was nothing more than a speck on her sensors, visible only in a half a dozen exotic spectrums, none of them visual, and the reassuring blip of the station’s subspace relay on her display was steadily fading. Ten more days, and the last reminder that humanity existed beyond the Galley’s bulkheads would be gone altogether.

The displays wrapped around the Galley’s bridge in a facsimile of a cockpit were similarly barren. A sea of stars hung in the sky beyond the ship’s nose, cold and distant, more than human science had devised names for. Sarah thought it was just the ostrich sticking its head in the sand on an interstellar level. Naming them would have been an admission that, for all the wonders of the jump network, there were still countless worlds beyond their reach. Instead, the ship’s system responded to her queries with an identification code, a discovery date, and a string of outdated information that was about as useful to her as a sun dress in zero G. A languorous smile stretched across her face.

She reached up and tugged her headset clear of one ear, arms slow and sluggish beneath the weight of the transport’s thrust. One point five G. Enough that doing anything more than sitting was likely to end with her tumbling down the ship’s corridor, flying across the cargo bay, and slamming into something in the engine room hard enough that anything that happened afterwards would involve a mop and a team of coroners. So she sat.

”Do you ever think about how far away we are?” Sarah didn’t need to turn her head to see James Arland. Spookshow was strapped into the pilot’s seat alongside her, almost a mirror image, though where her displays fed back a steady stream of flight information; power outputs and exhaust velocities, the Bretonian’s showed effective ranges and arcs of fire, engagement windows and intercept courses. This far out most of them were measured in weeks to contact. Sarah was certain the Galley, a tramp hauler by design, hadn’t come with that software package.

James looked up from the window he was examining. He appeared to be running simulations on the sparse armaments of the Galley. “Well… only when I look outside,” he said, gesturing to the great void in front of them.

”It’s different from the lanes. People say space is space, but you’re never far away when you’re on the network. Sure, there’s the distance, but it doesn’t mean anything when there’s always someone who can reach you. Not out here.” Sarah glanced at the displays and her lips curled into a contented smile. ”Out here it’s just you and the ship and the stars. It’s beautiful.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Solitude is good, at least when it’s not… enforced on you.” He paused to consider. “Though we’re off the network, we’re still in range of most other ships in our weight class. I’m not entirely certain whether I find that comforting or not.”

Sarah inclined her head in acknowledgement, then realised it was doubtful that Arland could see her. ”I know what you mean. The Barrier’s clientele aren’t exactly the cute-and-cuddly roadside recovery sort.” She let her hands drop to her lap. ”You’ve been out here before?”

“Yeah. Spent some time here after I deserted the Armed Forces. Mercenary work. Plenty of scum wanting to rid the universe of other scum in these parts,” He said. His tone was still pretty conversational, but it was fairly obvious he didn’t find much of his time on the station very pleasant.

”Do you want to talk about it?” Sarah tried to keep the question flippant, but couldn’t entirely keep the undertone of interest from her voice. The station had been home to her a few years ago, courtesy of the Vagrant Raiders.

James grimaced. “Not particularly. I doubt you’d find the gory details very interesting anyway. It all boils down to the same clutch of petty and senseless reasons when the various… personages… on the Barrier start putting out notices for trained killers. I didn’t take jobs that were too distasteful - not generally at least - and it was a living, I guess. Paid well enough. Something to help me gather up some of the resources I no longer had access to from the military.”

He might as well have been talking about doing the gardening, for all his tone changed. Sarah felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature. Her eyes flicked back to the screen, away from Arland’s voice. Sitting here, speaking with him, it was easy to forget what the man did for a living. Not for long.

”Why leave the Armed Forces? I don’t follow the war, but…” But Bretoina’s losing. She let the question hang.

James leaned his head back into the headrest - the stronger than normal gravity pressing it into the upholstery to the point where it might actually become a little uncomfortable, should he maintain that position long enough.

“There’s the kicker, isn’t it? If you’ve heard anything about the war at all - and you will have unless you’ve been living without a neural net connection for years - you know as well as I do that we’re losing. Sovereign system after system lost. How many millions of Bretonians - of my own generation - dead? Leeds, burning as the ground war drags on, cities, industrial centres and spaceports being bombed to rubble.” He stopped there for a moment.

“I left because we were making efforts to try and actually win this bloody war - at the very least even up the odds, regain some of the initiative - and the admiralty had the nerve to actively try and sabotage it. That’s why I’m no longer in. I will not serve someone who fights to lose. That is all.” The final syllables were clipped, staccato and endlessly bitter.

Sarah sat in silence for a long minute, taken aback. Super, Sarah. Well done. If she’d hit that nerve any harder she would have needed a sledgehammer. Normally Arland was cheerful enough, but this was a glimpse of something, someone, else altogether. Someone Sarah wasn’t sure she was comfortable seeing. She twisted her head to look at him, thrust pushing her cheek into the headrest. His jaw was clenched, arctic blue eyes fixed forward like a soldier on parade. Sarah could see the veins in his neck. ”God, James. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was that bad.”

He exhaled, slowly. Turned to meet her eyes. Some of the tension seemed to have dissipated out of his body. “The war becomes rather different when you see it up close, for what it is. I don’t blame you for having kept that at a distance. It’s not exactly pleasant, is it? I can count the people I graduated with out of Basic who are still alive on one hand. The violence - the loss, the anger - it changes you, whether you like it or not.”

Sarah didn’t nod, but she didn’t look away either. When she spoke her voice was soft, barely audible over the drone of the engines. ”Life changes you. No-one’s proud of everything they’ve done. Everything they’ve become. I don’t know. We all go eventually, but, like that...” She shook her head, the expression more suggestion than motion, flicked her eyes toward the display and back. ”It seems like such a waste. None of those stars have ever seen a human being. Sirius is a tiny, tiny, fraction of the worlds out there. We’re rarer than planets, and we’re spending our time killing each other. Gallia. Liberty. Bretonia. I wonder if it matters, in the end. If it’s worth it.”

James smiled faintly, looked back out into the void. He wasn’t really looking at the stars. “That’s a wonderful way to put it, Sarah. And I genuinely wish I could see it like that. But when it comes down to it - no matter how precious each life is in the grand perspective of things - we cannot escape our own… flaws. As a species. Not as we are currently. Paradoxically enough, we are made to be capable of horrific violence, and at the same time, it’s actually quite rare to see a species so averse to it. Look on the bright side, I suppose. If we truly lacked restraint altogether, I suppose we would have rendered ourselves extinct ages ago.”

”Avoiding extinction is the bright side? Leslie was right. You really do know how to ramp up the morbid, Spookshow.” Sarah smiled and turned back to her display. The smile dropped off her face almost immediately. A little gasp of disbelief slipped from her. ”No, no. That’s not right.”

James snapped back, fully present. “What? What is it?”

Sarah’s voice rose a couple of octaves in surprise. ”Chardon. The derelict’s hailing us.”

---

"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."

- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.

| Character Sheet | Craft of the Widerstand | Sarah's Theme | Feedback |