Relative Gravity / Chapter 03 (Text)

FENIX

Ursa Station | Tartarus Sector

"I'll give you each ten-thousand shares if you let me shower and change my clothes," Fenix said to the two security officers escorting him to the shuttle waiting at the Forces upper docking ring. They were floating beside him, up the station's long zero-g gravvidor, but neither of them so much as swiveled their faceplates toward him. "Make it twenty," he amended, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. 

The officers didn't acknowledge the attempted bribe. They wouldn't do the slightest thing to draw the general's ire. Royalty or not, Fenix was toxic. 

His face was swollen, his cheek and jaw puffed up, and by the way it was throbbing, probably already starting to bruise. He'd been wearing the same clothes for two days, hadn't slept, and after the zig-zag adrenaline spikes of the pokeh game and the general's beat down, Fenix felt like wrung-out shit. 

Though the bottle of bourbon he'd consumed over the past twelve hours might have contributed some. Or the two bottles before that. 

His head was quaking like a Tiamese dance floor—and he knew from experience the party was only just warming up. He needed another handful of neurafin. The painkillers kept the consequences of his decadence at bay, but his last dose was wearing thin, and there was nothing Fenix hated more than consequences. 

He considered, for a brief instant, making a break for it. Ordering Rodok to kill the guards and steal him a ship. Once they were off the station, he could talk his way out of whatever came next...

But that was a fantasy. He knew it wasn't possible. 

This time felt different. He was in last chance territory. After all the schools he'd been kicked out of, and the fortunes he'd lost, Father had finally run out of patience. No doubt, given even the slightest excuse, the old bastard would follow through on his threats. Fenix would not survive Narod.

The planet, he was convinced, had been settled on a dare. Tidally locked to its sun—one side a frigid wasteland, the other an irradiated wasteland—with gravity twice as high as Earth's, a lung-crushing atmosphere, and an ecosystem seemingly evolved to kill anyone who ventured into the perpetual twilight outside the settlement walls, it hadn't been an obvious candidate for colonization. 

Somehow mad settlers had conquered the narrow strip of habitable land along the border between day and night, and now nearly twenty-five million people lived there. 

Miserably, Fenix assumed.

The officers kept still beside him, with Rodok silent below, like guards moving a convict to his cell—which, in a way, they were. He had twelve months left on his sentence, and he'd already exhausted all his favors with the warden. Next time he screwed up, he was headed to the gulag. 

The thought of it made his stomach flip, and with the hangover rushing at him, he nearly threw up right there in the gravvidor. 

He clamped his lips and choked it back down. He was already a laughingstock, floating up to the shuttle in a cloud of his own vomit would only add to the humiliation.

For now, he was doomed, helpless, his fate set to dismal. He saw the people gawping at him, even more than usual, hiding their smirks behind their hands. The ones who bothered to hide them. 

Tales of his disgrace were already oozing through the station. It'd be all over the rumor-net by the end of the day and blazing across the mainstream Collective feeds by tomorrow morning. 

He’d barely recovered from his last bout of bad press, and here he was, already sliding into another. 

Perhaps it was a blessing he was about go dark. He could lay low while it all blew over, recuperate, and engineer a splash to reemerge–something to steer the conversation back in his favor. 

Maybe the blasted ship would finally be ready, and he could surf the buzz of the Collective Forces’ shiny new weapon until everyone got bored and he could retire with fanfare and return to his freedoms. He'd have to suffer through until then. 

Or until another solution presented itself.

Fenix kept the contents of his stomach in place until they got to the docking ring, then cradled his aching jaw while gravity shifted and pulled them out of the float. From there, it was a short march to the airlock. 

It cycled open as they approached, and after a moment's hesitation, Fenix stepped into the claustrophobic chamber. Rodok ducked in behind and the door irised shut, then the bright blue blaze of the shuttle's decontamination cycle snapped on, blasting him with cold air, assaulting his senses and dancing halos in his vision. 

He squeezed his eyes and held his breath. Light rippled in a false-color kaleidoscope through his scrunched eyelids as what felt like shards of glass pressed into the back of his eyeballs.

He’d only been on the station, so the de-com was absolutely unnecessary. This was Nakayama, signaling the start of her retribution. 

The months of abuse she'd been unable to reciprocate were about to come back at him full force.

Once the lights dimmed to normal and the internal door opened, he blinked his watery eyes, stumbled into the cabin, and fell into the seat furthest from the pilot, the one next to the head. He planned on sleeping until they reached the Dominus, but he wanted to be right beside the toilet in case of an emergency. 

Rodok took his spot beside him, feet mag-locked to the deck and hand wrapped tight around the bulkhead. Rodok never sat.

The pilot was turned in her chair, watching them. There were eight other seats on the round deck, arranged on gimbals around the circumference, each next to a work console. Fenix and Rodok were the only passengers. 

He recognized the pilot’s shaggy half-black, half-white hairstyle from the other times she'd been sent to retrieve him, but couldn't remember her name. 

Ensign—something. 

"Please fasten your restraints, sir," she said, then waited until Fenix pulled the straps down over his chest and fastened the buckle between his legs. "Thank you."

She didn't look at Rodok at all. 

Fenix shut his eyes and nurtured his despair as the shuttle jerked away from the station. The jostling was bad enough—it felt like his brain was rattling around loose in his head—but the shuttle was meant only for short-haul trips and not important enough to warrant gravity plating, so when she flipped them and accelerated away from the station, the pressure threatened to overwhelm his head’s fragile truce with his churning guts. 

"Could we maybe take it easy?" he asked after he was sure he could speak without anything else coming out. "I'm in no hurry."

"Captain Nakayama is," the ensign replied. "She ordered me to return with all possible haste."

The general’s punishment had been brutal, but at least with him it had been quick.

"What kind of mood is she in?"

"Her mood, sir?"

"Did she seem especially...Nakayama-y?"

"Sir?"

"You know, all morose and surly with her face like—" He squinched his nose and let his mouth hang.

The ensign raised an eyebrow. "No, sir. Quite the opposite."

Uh oh. "What do you mean?"

"In a word, sir, I'd describe her as ‘giddy.’" 

"Giddy?"

"I’ve been on the ship for a year, sir,” the ensign said, “and this is the happiest I've ever seen her."

Shit. The vice in his head twisted a notch tighter. "Can you toss me the medical kit?"

"Sorry, sir."

He didn't understand. "I have a headache. I need medicine."

"I can't provide you with medical aid, sir."

His thoughts went fuzzy. "You can't provide me with medical aid?"

"That's correct, sir."

"Why not?"

"Captain's orders."

"The captain ordered you not to give me neurafin?"

"She did. Specifically. And anything else you might request. Her exact words were, 'Unless death is imminent.'"

Which, at this point, didn't seem such an unappealing option. "She intends to make my life hell."

"Oh, absolutely, sir," the ensign agreed.

"Ensign—" He struggled to remember her name. Lemon? Was it Lemon? Wollev? He didn't know. The way his head was pounding he was glad he could remember who he was. 

"Yeung," she reminded him.

"Yeung..." he repeated like it had been on the tip of his tongue, but even as he was saying it, her name was already slipping from his memory. “If I were to try to sleep, what would you do?”

“Squawk the comms, sir.”

“So, no sleep?”

“No, sir.” She turned and gave him a conciliatory shrug. “Sorry, sir.”

He reclined back into the thrust, once again closed his eyes, and took long, deep breaths. A moment later something fell into his lap. He looked down at a light blue blister pack. Neurafin.

He shivered through an endorphin rush at the thought of the coming relief.

“Thank you,” Fenix said, at that moment more grateful for these two little pills than any gift he’d ever received in his life. He wanted to jump up and kiss her.

The ensign had her back to him, studying one of the screens. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” she said, but angled her head and smiled.

And that was the kick he needed. A thousand times more effective than any painkiller. Even wearing two-day old clothes and smelling like a night gone rotten, he was still Prince Fenix. 

He smiled back, noticing for the first time how attractive she was. Adventurous hairstyle and curious eyes, just his type.

Maybe he’d find some small consolation during his exile after all.

***

True to her word, the two times he drifted off, the ensign filled the ship with a squelch of feedback that jerked him awake. Even without sleep, the blessed neurafin kept his head from caving in, and by the time they were approaching the Dominus, he almost felt like himself. 

With nothing else to occupy him, he watched the Dominus approach through one of his screens. He had little patience for the Forces, with all their selfless rah-rah bombast—he disdained service of any kind, absolutely bristled at doing anything other than exactly what he wanted—but even he had to admit the Dominus was impressive. From the outside, anyway.

Father had sunk hundreds of trillions of Collective shares into its research and construction, something no other consortium or government in the known worlds could possibly match. 

He'd already spent six months aboard, but the warship was still an imposing sight. 

They came at the ship as if from below, passing under the thruster bank and rising along its length. In a design unique in the Collective, it resembled a flying wedge, like a distorted hexagon, flaring out from a narrow blade along the nose, to omni-directional point defense cannons at each wide corner, then back into the squat aft section housing twelve fusion thrusters. 

Two plasma cannons sat on the dorsal and ventral surfaces, their barrels stretching nearly two-thirds the length of the ship, and there were even more weapons hidden under the ship’s plating. It was a flying arsenal, built for combat, but the weapons were nothing compared to the propulsion system: the flexion drive.

A bright silver strip cut along the ship’s narrow axis—a dense array of grav-projectors strong enough to compress the fabric of the universe and all powered by the tiny black hole housed in the ship’s core. 

The flex drive allowed for impossible speed and maneuverability, let the ship skate over the surface of reality like a bug on a pond. In testing and over short distances, they'd reached speeds equivalent to multiples of the speed of light, all without any local time dilation. 

The engineers estimated they could easily double that again, and potentially far, far more. 

It was a technological marvel, and with it the Collective would finally bring the wicked Assembly to its heel. If only they could figure out how to keep it running longer than a few seconds at a time.

They couldn’t go much further than a few million kilometers before the computer systems choked on the spacetime calculations and the gravity wave violently collapsed, triggering gravatonic quakes that threatened the ship’s structural integrity.  

 It didn’t appear as though the Dominus was going anywhere anytime soon, and now Fenix was stuck in limbo right along with it.

He tried for a moment of positivity as the shuttle closed toward the airlock. Maybe a little boring wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Give him a chance to regroup.

But he knew Nakayama wouldn’t make it easy.

As the shuttle docked, Fenix took the chance to compose himself. He smoothed down his hair, buttoned his shirt and straightened his jacket. He wasn't in uniform, but there wasn't much he could do about that. He'd just have to face Captain Nakayama with his tail between his legs and hope she took pity on him.

The ensign opened the airlock and waved Fenix ahead. Rodok followed him out.

They still weren't on the ship's gravity, so he had to float himself out using the railings. The Dominus' plating took hold as he crossed through the airlock, and as his feet were pulled to the floor, he was glad to once again possess a reliable sense of "down."

He'd expected Nakayama to be waiting for him, like she'd been the other times he'd arrived late for his rotation, standing with her arms crossed and a scowl on her face, but the corridor was empty.

"Where's the captain?" he asked the ensign as she dropped down onto the deck beside him. She raised her eyebrow and stuck her thumb in the air. The command deck, up in the ship’s nose.

"So, it's to be a public execution?"

"It would appear so," the ensign replied. "You're ordered to report directly to the bridge."

Fenix straightened, cocked his head, and flashed his grin at her. Setting things up for later. "If it’s to be a firing squad, I want to be presentable.” He dragged his fingers through his hair and narrowed his eyes. “How do I look?”

“Presentable, sir,” the ensign said, her expression not giving anything away as she turned toward the port gravvidor.

But he knew the effect he had. Her heart would be in her throat.

He followed her to the gravvidor, said, "Command," and with a familiar wink, stepped past her, off the edge of the deck, not worried about the fifty-meter drop to engineering.

He knew he’d be seeing her later. 

The grav field caught him in a light grip that tingled on his skin, then whisked him upwards toward his waiting fate.

As always, the Dominus was a flurry of activity. The captain drove the crew hard, but they were months behind schedule. Everyone knew how important the prototype was to the Collective and were all working to the limit to get the ship ready. 

Most of them didn't have much use for Fenix, ship's First Officer or not, and just like back on the station, they were unable to hide their sneers as they watched him pass. 

His ears buzzed. Word of his shame had already spread to the ship. He tried to arrange his face to seem disinterested, like this was all beneath him, but couldn't quite relax into his regular studied apathy. 

He wasn't used to reprimands—or harsh words of any kind—and this was about to be the second in as many hours. All his life he'd been acquiesced to, his every whim answered with a smile, however begrudging. But his shield of royalty had buckled, and he wasn't quite sure what to expect. 

So far, the experience had been extremely unpleasant.

The gravvidor dropped him at the bridge. Rodok came off next and stood aside, parking itself next to the emergency lockers. 

Unlike other Collective military ships he'd been on, the Dominus' command deck wasn’t designed for claustrophobic utilitarian functionality. It was a long rectangle, with a high, sloped ceiling, built around an elevated bridge in the center, with two pods of four duty stations on either side, and flanked by the ship’s two gravvidors at each end.

The walls were all display-capable, and currently set to transparent, making it seem like the bright bridge was floating in the star-speckled black, with Ursa Station off to the left, and the tiny blur of Tartarus to the right. 

He lurched out of the gravity field like he was stepping out into open space, and his stomach heaved. He had to stop and stare at the floor until the vertiginous wobble passed.

The energy in the room shifted as the crew quit poking at their screens. The captain was standing on the bridge with her arms behind her back, beaming down at him, her eyes hooded with stifled bliss. 

Captain Juliet Nakayama was a serious woman and a zealous officer, a phenom of the Collective Forces, hand-picked by General al-Jarrah for captain of the most important ship in human history. She wore the responsibility of her position with the same meticulous standards she wore her slate gray and dark orange uniform: tailored to nanometer precision. 

Other than a thin black line along her upper eyelids, she wore no makeup, and her shiny black hair was cut short and smoothed regulation-tight over her ears. With her high cheekbones and lined forehead, she was striking—attractive, sure, but her personality did her no favors. 

Fenix always imagined she'd be an overbearing grouse in bed, all orders and frowns of disappointment. Of course, he wouldn't have refused the chance to confirm his suspicions. If the opportunity ever presented itself, he'd hold his nose and suffer it. For science.

She waited for Fenix to recover and slink past the crew’s silent judgment, and once he reached the base of the ramp, she narrowed her intense brown eyes and finally stepped to intercept him, glaring at him down her nose. 

Fenix just stared at her chin and focused on not speaking until spoken to.

"Leave ended eight hours ago," she eventually said.

"The general was kind enough to remind me," he replied, keeping his tone neutral, then quickly added, "Captain."

"As I heard," Nakayama said, a fresh glee filling her face. “I even understand there’s a vid.”

Fenix recoiled. Rumors were one thing, but a vid could make this humiliation last for years. "I can’t believe you called the general on me," he said, fighting to control his reflexive sulk.  

“You can’t believe it?” She screwed up her eyes. "I’ll have you know it was a pleasure." She stopped, like she couldn't contain the joy. Like the ensign, he’d never seen her happy either. She took after her mentor that way. "And the look on the general’s face when I reported your dereliction of duty was better than any fuck I've had in years." That explains a lot, buzzed across his thoughts, but he forced them silent. "Do you know what's even sweeter? I just got off the comms with him." She laughed. Actually laughed. The rest of the bridge crew had stopped all pretense of working and were turned in their seats, enjoying the show.

The left side of her face stayed smiling, while the right pulled into a hateful sneer. "He informed me you have finally reached the end of your royal rope, and I am longer required to swallow your shit.” Her eyes narrowed. “Commander Vyyker-Chang, you will follow my orders, to the letter, without comment or complaint, and you will show respect whether you feel it or not."

"That's not—" Fenix didn't like the way the conversation was headed, and tried to deflect it back somewhere he could control, but Nakayama had been building up to this for six months and wasn't about to be derailed.

She stepped closer, bent herself nose to nose. 

"I don't like you," she said, now free to speak her mind. "I never have. You're spoiled. And weak. And selfish. And lazy."

"Don't forget ungrateful," Fenix risked adding. She couldn't reprimand him for agreeing with her.

She made an animal noise in her throat. "I don't want you on my ship. If it were up to me, I'd feed you to Tartarus. But I will do as I'm told, for the good of the Collective." She paused, as if expecting Fenix to argue, and almost seemed disappointed when he didn't. "Keep your mouth shut and follow my orders and a year from now you can return to your gilded pretense of a life and let the grown-ups keep your empire safe—but so we're clear, the general has left your position on this ship at my discretion. Even the slightest hint of insubordination, one crossed look, one muffled breath, and I'll personally book your transport to Narod.” She stepped back up the ramp. “Do we understand each other?"

Fenix nodded. What else could he do?

"No," Nakayama said, twisting the knife. "I want you to say it."

Once more, humiliation flushed over him, but instead of one of the thousand spiteful things he wanted to say, he forced his head up and barked in a clear, loud voice, "Understood, Captain."

He'd never hated himself more than at that moment, but he immediately redirected the feeling back at her. He may have a year of torture ahead, but life was long, and when this lark in the military was over, she'd still be a captain, and he'd once again be the Second Sovereign. 

His vengeance would be slow and brutal. 

Maybe he'd take a few years, plant evidence, start rumors, lay the groundwork for a treason charge that would see her exiled and her family name erased. That could be fun.

Or a court-martial. Get her sent to the military prison on Narod—how deliciously ironic would that be?

Now it was his turn to stifle a smile.

"Excellent," the captain said. "Now go clean yourself up and be back at your post in ten minutes. You'll be finishing this rotation, then the next two."

Three rotations? That was more than a full day on the bridge. He nearly slipped and told her where she could shove her rotations, but bit back his words, chewed, and swallowed. He needed to toe the line. For now, at least. 

She'd cool down eventually. Everyone would forget he was on thin ice, and he'd get some wiggle room back.

"Yes, Captain," he said, and knowing he shouldn’t salute out of uniform, snapped to attention, then spun on his heel and marched toward the gravvidor.

"Oh, and Commander?" the captain added. "I've moved your quarters down into the crew deck. I'm sure you won't mind."

"No, sir," Fenix said, pressing his jaw tight to keep his tongue from getting him in more trouble.

"That's what I like to hear," Nakayama said. Oh, she was going to milk this. "Dismissed—"

A warning klaxon cut her off, and a red light flashed on the wall display, circling a shimmer in the stars between them and Tartarus.

"What is it?" Nakayama said, already striding toward her chair.

"Skip-gate opening, sir,” the officer at the security console reported. "Between us and Tartarus, two mega-klicks off ISCO."

The innermost stable circular orbit was the closest you could park a ship around the black hole, but only if it was moving at close to half the speed of light. It took months for support ships to get to and from the stations there.

"There are no transports scheduled to rendezvous with the mining platform," the captain said. She didn't need to double check.

"None, sir," the comms officer confirmed anyway.

"Contact Ursa Station. See if they forgot to tell us they were expecting a shipment—"

"Sir, an unknown ship just exited the gate," the tactical officer working the scanners announced. "A transport, burning hard. They're heading for Tartarus."

Why the hell would anyone want to head for Tartarus?

"Get me an ID," Nakayama said. "Are they transmitting?"

"Negative, sir. I'm not detecting a Collective transponder."

"Hail them."

Five anxious seconds passed. 

"No reply, Captain."

"Keep trying," Nakayama said to the tac officer. Then turned to the helmsman. "Plot an intercept course."

“Captain," the tactical officer said. "The ship isn't one of ours. Looks like a modified Assembly freighter. But it is carrying the gravity lance stolen from the Begemot last month."

The captain huffed. She wasn't upset, she was excited. She'd already spent a year flying in circles out here before Fenix arrived. A fight had just fallen into her lap. This was the most action the ship and crew had ever seen.

"That gravity lance is Collective property," she said. "I intend to reclaim it. Sound ‘Action Stations’ and ready the flexion drive."

The bridge lighting lowered from clean white to blue, and a hushed intensity came over the bridge. Then the captain addressed the ship.

"This is Captain Nakayama," she started, as if anyone would need the reminder. "All duty crew report to stations. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill. An unknown craft has entered Tartarus space. We are activating the flexion drive and moving to engage." She paused as she surveyed the bridge crew, as though she was talking to each of them personally. "This is what we've been training for, and I'm counting on all of you to make the Collective proud. Nakayama out."

It was all showy and heroic and Fenix was sure the crew were all positively swollen with enthusiasm at the prospect of tackling a real threat, but Fenix couldn't muster up the energy to be concerned. 

Whatever that ship was doing out here, the Dominus, even in its unfinished state, was more than enough to handle it. Most likely they were a suicide cult determined to throw themselves into the black hole and earn themselves eternal life or whatever. Wouldn't be the first time. This was all a bit much.

He tried to slink off the bridge without being noticed, hoping the captain would be distracted enough he could squeeze a little longer out of the ten minutes she'd given him to clean up, 'Action Stations' or not.

No such luck.

"Eight minutes!" Nakayama called after him as he dropped into the gravvidor. 

There was no escaping, no wiggle room at all.

He was trapped, out of options for the first time in his life, and the thought of his complete and utter impotence was enough to turn his stomach more violently than any hangover he’d ever had.