Chapter 26: What It Means To Be A Captain [II]

From across the hall, behind Elena’s door, came a different sound.

It was sharp and breathy, choked with misery.

Elena wasn’t weeping loudly... She was trying to swallow her own breath making small sharp whimpers escape past her teeth like someone trying to breathe through cracked ribs.

A faucet clicked on behind the door, followed by the soft clatter of a glass falling into a sink, and then the quiet helpless weeping of a girl who had just realized that her family’s billions, their private security fleets and their high-orbit towers had all turned to dust while she sat on an iron bunk in a flight suit covered in worm grease...

Further down, from Camila’s room, the tears came with whispered fragments of Spanish.

Broken prayers... Names of sisters... Names of parents... All of it muttered in a desperate pleading rhythm between ragged breaths that hitched every few seconds.

From Chloe’s door there was no loud weeping at all, only a thin fragile sniffling, tiny and terrified, like a child curled into a ball behind a locked wardrobe praying the monsters outside wouldn’t notice she was still breathing.

And then, loudest of all, came the sound from the room on the right.

Ms. Tachibana’s room.

There was no pride left in it and no calm measured tone that belonged behind a lecture podium in Kyoto.

Aoi was weeping openly, her chest heaving in deep shuddering wails that pushed straight through the thin door... the sound of a woman who had kept her spine straight while the universe burned around her, who had calculated trajectories with steady hands while her world was ripped apart, and was now coming undone in the dark.

...She was crying for her home, for the streets she would never walk down again, and for the family she had left behind on an Earth that didn’t exist anymore.

The sounds bled together in the empty corridor and washed over the polished floor like cold water.

Leo stood in the middle of the hall with his eyes fixed on the blank metal of his own door.

He didn’t move.

’Everyone needs to let their heart out...’ he thought, his jaw tightening until the bone ached.

The air in the corridor felt thick with everything they had run from since the white light hit Room 402.

’Of course they miss home...’ he thought. ’How could they not?’

...He missed it too.

It sat in his chest like an iron anvil, pressing down on his lungs. He had shoved it away on the bridge.

He had shoved it away when the oxygen timer was flashing red and when the Brood-Mother was lunging at the glass but there was nothing left to shove it away with now.

Back home there was a small two-story house at the edge of the valley, with a kitchen that always smelled of dark roast coffee and burnt toast on Saturday mornings.

His father’s beat-up sedan sat in the driveway with its squeaking fan belt, and his mother’s laugh came drifting in from the garden behind the patio.

And his little sister.

She was seventeen... She had a terrible habit of sneaking into his room while he was at university, stealing his oversized grey hoodies and leaving empty soda cans under his desk like a signature.

She was supposed to finish her final year of high school this autumn... She’d wanted to study marine biology but she was gone.

All of them were gone... Ninety-eight point nine percent of humanity, wiped off the board in the time it took to blink...

His house was gone... The trees in the yard were gone... The valley, the ocean, the old stone arches of the aeronautics department... all of it chewed up and spat into the void.

His hands clenched into tight bloodless fists inside his pockets.

He felt the prickle behind his eyes, hot and bitter, as a burning lump climbed into his throat and begged him to walk to that door at the end of the hall, lock himself in, throw his face into the bunk and scream until his throat bled.

’No,’ he thought, biting the inside of his lip until he tasted copper. ’Not me...’

He forced his chin up and his breathing into a flat steady rhythm.

...He couldn’t cry.

He couldn’t let his shoulders sag or his hands shake, and he couldn’t let a single tear carve a line through the grime on his cheeks.

He was the Captain.

The fusion core was bound to his pulse and the ship was locked to his DNA.

If the six of them were going to survive out here in this cold empty graveyard, they needed an anchor... someone who could look at the void without blinking, who could sit on that bridge while monsters chewed through the hull and say "fire" without a tremor in his voice.

If he broke down, if they walked out of their rooms tomorrow and saw their Captain with red eyes and shaking hands, hollowed out by the same despair that was crushing them, how could they ever trust him to keep them alive?

...Who would hold the wheel?

The grief in the corridor didn’t stop.

It rose and fell in ragged waves, Aoi’s muffled wails mixing with Harper’s choked sobs and Camila’s broken prayers.

Leo took one long slow breath and pulled the cool clean air deep into his belly then he turned his back on his own door.

His boots clicked softly against the amber runners as he walked past the locked rooms and the tears leaking through their seams, straight through the open archway into the empty kitchen.

The kitchen was narrow and smelled faintly of cold stainless steel.

It was a long galley squeezed between the central spine and the life support manifold, with steel countertops along both sides under strip lights that cast a soft warm glow over everything.

A four-burner induction stove sat flush in the left counter, its black glass completely pristine, with a small round sink near the entrance.

Leo tapped the face of the stove.

A soft chime sounded and a faint red ring woke up under the black glass.

He waved his hand under the tap and clean water hissed out in a sharp steady arc before cutting off the instant he pulled away.

BEEP!

A flat deadpan voice crackled down from the little grille in the vent hood.

[The Master Captain has successfully located both the heat source and the water without starting an electrical fire or drowning himself in fifteen centimeters of greywater... This unit is profoundly relieved, The local sector had already begun preparing an obituary citing death by domestic appliance.]

Leo let out a quiet breath and shook his head.

"Glad I could exceed your expectations."

[My expectations were underground, Master Captain... Exceeding them only required you to stand up.]

Leo ignored the ceiling and opened the tall pantry against the back wall.

PSSH!

The door slid open on smooth tracks to reveal chilled shelves stacked with sealed containers.

He pulled the nearest bin out and popped the seal.

Inside sat a coarse paper sack of flour, a small glass jar of mineral salt, three vacuum-packed bricks of dried beans and a sealed jug of vegetable oil... and in the chiller drawer below, a block of pale butter, a dozen sealed eggs, a bundle of fresh scallions wrapped in damp mesh and a couple of kilos of cured pork shoulder in clear plastic.

...Earth food, Real food grown in soil that didn’t exist anymore.

Leo picked up the sack of flour and felt the powdery weight shift in his palms as a cold quiet knot tightened in his stomach.

’How long does this even last?’ he wondered, staring at the shelves. ’A week? Ten days if we stretch every calorie?’

There were seven of them on board.

Once these few bricks of beans and handfuls of flour were gone, the pantry would just be an empty steel box... and out here there were no grocery stores, no supply shuttles and no markets waiting past the next asteroid.

"AI," Leo said, his voice low in the quiet room. "What happens when this runs out?"

[A predictable question... This food was a one-time courtesy created during the upgrade. When it is gone, the crew will not starve. The Foundry Core contains an organic synthesizer. It can process raw minerals, recycled organic waste and scavenged biomass directly into an edible, balanced nutrient base.]

Leo grimaced.

"Nutrient paste?"

[It has calories, essential amino acids and zero aesthetic appeal... It will keep your heart pumping, though it tastes like damp chalk and wet cardboard. If the Master Captain prefers buttered toast, he is encouraged to locate a five-star restaurant drifting between the meteorites.]

"Chalk and cardboard," Leo muttered, setting the flour down on the counter. "Figured."

He looked at everything laid out in front of him.

If this was the last real meal they were going to get before the ship started feeding them sludge, he wasn’t going to let them eat it cold out of a packet.

’Everyone’s hurting,’ he thought, rolling his sleeves up past his elbows. ’A warm meal won’t fix what we lost... but it’s something. It’s better than an empty stomach in the dark.’

He pulled a big steel mixing bowl off the lower rack.

CLANG!

Generous scoops of flour, a heavy pinch of salt and a steady stream of cold water from the tap went in, and his calloused hands dug into the mix until it pulled together into a rough shaggy lump.

He dumped it onto the steel counter and threw his weight into the heels of his palms.

THUD! THUD!

The solid slap of the dough against the metal gave him something to focus on.

Leo kneaded it with steady strokes, stretching it, folding it over and pressing it down again until the rough surface turned into a smooth elastic ball.

Back home, on cold Sunday mornings when the rain rattled the gutters outside his window, his mother had always made flatbread from scratch.

She would stand over the cast-iron pan humming songs completely off-key while his father sat at the little kitchen table reading the paper.

And his sister would always stumble downstairs twenty minutes late with her hair like a bird’s nest, wearing one of his hoodies down to her knees, complaining that he’d finished the orange juice right before stealing half a warm pancake off his plate.

Leo’s hands paused on the counter with his knuckles white against the dough.

The memory hit him with a sharp physical ache behind his breastbone.

He could almost smell the old gas stove... He could almost hear her dry mocking laugh as she told him his flight simulators were just glorified video games.

’Let it go,’ he told himself, breathing slowly through his nose until the tightness in his chest eased a little. ’Not now... Keep moving...’

He covered the bowl with a clean cloth to let the dough rest and turned to the cutting board.

THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!

The knife moved in quick steady beats as he sliced the pork into thin strips marbled with ribbons of white fat, then chopped the scallions into neat little green rings.

Two heavy pans went onto the burners.

HISS!

A spoonful of butter hit the first one and foamed instantly into a sizzling golden pool, and the smell filled the whole galley... rich and warm, wiping out the metallic stench of scorched hyperalloy and worm ichor that had clung to the ship for hours.

He dropped the pork into the fat.

SSSSSSSS!

It curled and crackled, spitting little beads of oil against the backsplash as the smoky smell of it bloomed up into the hood.

He tossed in the scallions and stirred until the edges of the meat browned into crisp savory curls.

"Mmm, is this right...?"

Leo split the rested dough into eight pieces and rolled each one into a thin wide circle, brushed them with oil, scattered scallions across the middle, rolled them up tight like snails and flattened them again into flaky layered rounds.

TSSS!

They went into the second pan and blistered immediately, puffing up into golden pockets with mottled brown spots as he flipped them one by one until the whole kitchen smelled like fresh bread and roasted meat.

He cracked eggs into the pork fat until the whites went crisp and lacy, then mashed a pot of simmered beans into a warm savory spread.

By the time he turned the burners off, the counter was lined with seven trays.

Two flaky scallion flatbreads, a pile of crisp pork, a soft egg and a little dish of bean spread on each one, with a tumbler of cold water beside it.

"AI," he said, wiping his brow with his forearm. "Can you open the doors from the bridge, or do I have to knock?"

[Privacy protocols forbid this unit from exposing the crew during their scheduled emotional collapse... The Master Captain must apply his knuckles to the doors like an uncivilized nomad, Try not to drop the food. It is statistically unlikely that floor-aged pork improves morale.]

Leo snorted softly.

He picked up the first two trays, balancing one on his forearm, and stepped out into the corridor.

The hallway was still bathed in that soft amber twilight... but the weeping had stopped.

Behind every door it was dead silent now, a heavy suffocating silence that somehow felt worse than the crying had.