Excerpt: Pegasus

PEGASUS
Prologue

I looked into my brother's dead eyes and knew that I had killed him.
Oh fuck that, it was over 100 years ago.
I'm on a spaceship, believe it or not, flying to some damn place that nobody has ever gone before. No humans, at any rate. And boldly, I guess. I was born in 1964, but here I go in 2123, on past Earth and Mars and shit.
Freaky.
Have you ever been driving a little Ford Pinto down the street, with a cheap-ass stereo, and been sitting at a traffic light, listening to your music and minding your own, when some fool with a massive sound system pulls up beside you playing some thumping something that makes your ear wax drip out?
Probably not, considering how long it's been since Ford made a Pinto, but I'm gonna pretend just the same.
Here's a little trick for you. Pop in THE PLANETS by Gustav Holst. I tell you what. Do it now. Listen to the first track.
I'll wait.
Spronkie, isn't it?
The first track is called "Mars, The Bringer of War," and it's loaded with brass. It will stir your heart, if you have one, but that's not my point.
Here's my point.
No matter how cheap your car's sound system, that particular track will blow the ears off the fool with the amps and the bass going thumpa thumpa thump.
But I digress.
As our little spaceship left Mars and we watched the red planet slowly shrink behind us on the viewscreens, the captain decided that we on the bridge should hear the same track.
I swear, the man is spronkie.
The fact that he would eventually despise me is irrelevant. He's still spronkie.
Just don't tell him I said that.

PEGASUS
Chapter One

We're leaving together.
But still it's farewell.
And maybe we'll come back
to Earth. Who can tell?
I guess there is no one to blame.
We're leaving ground.
Will things ever be the same again?
It's the final countdown.

"Shut up, Barry."
"You got it, Adam."
"Can't you call me Commander Weinberg?"
"It's hard to salute a man when you might have fucked his great-great-great-great-grandmother."
"Why are you on my bridge?"
"The same reason Doctor McCoy was always on the bridge of the ENTERPRISE. It's a Southern thing."
"Why are you on my bridge?"
"As a member of your crack Security team, when I'm not securing your crack, I'm making sure there aren't any Muslims on the bridge. None on the ship, actually, because it'd be hell always figuring out which way Mecca is."
"Why are you on my bridge?"
"I just like hanging out here, that's all. I guess you'd prefer John Glenn."
"I'd settle for someone who could sing well, on key, preferably not some obscure 1980s disco hit that only he and I have heard and which isn't appropriate."
"No, disco would be Push Push In The Bush. Not appropriate how?"
"My plan is to bring us back, besides which the next line in your little ditty claims we're heading for Venus. Wrong direction, which is why I'm glad you're not one of my pilots."
"Amen to that," threw in a woman who was sitting at a piloting console.
"What, you'd rather let a woman drive?"
"Your ignorance never ceases to astound me. Every study we've done over the past 300 years shows that women have quicker reflexes –"
"Plus we use maps," the woman at the piloting console interjected.
"—And I presume a test somewhere shows you're not as stupid as you pretend to be," Weinberg finished.
"But you could be wrong."
"I could indeed."
"Wait a minute, Commander. Was that a joke?"
"Why don't you think about it somewhere away from the bridge, in case you feel the need to move your lips?"
"Now that was a joke."
Weinberg chose not to respond.
"Ah well," I commented. "When you're extremely good looking you can't be smart too."
I was almost in the turbolift – yeah, we do call it that – when I turned back to the man.
"Hey Commander, did you know that you were voted least likely to use an LOL or an emoticon?"
"Good."
My name's Barry, as you've probably guessed by now. Barry Drake. I was born November 10, 1964 in Fayettehell. Oh, excuse me, Fayettenam. No wait, Fayetteville. North Carolina. I told you I was Southern.
The first job I held after high school was MP. And given how far the US Army has fallen, I'll translate that as Military Policeman in case you don't know. I've never been a Member of Parliament.
Two years later, I returned home and became a jail deputy. Then a street cop. Then a police detective. After my career hit the skids, I bounced around as a repo man, a private eye, a bounty hunter, and a bodyguard. Just over a century later, I still work in the Security field, although we use the more honest name of Enforcement these days. Never let it be said that I suffer from an excess of imaJudytion.
You probably guessed part of what I left out. Cryonic freeze. Now, it's not cryogenics, and using that term is the sign of a layman.
Why are cryonics patients stored upside-down?
That sounds like a joke, doesn't it?
Gee, Barry, I don't know, why are cryonics patients stored upside down?
And the answer is...
They're not. Cryonics really isn't used anymore.
But I bet you wanted another answer.
If there's a power outage, anything frozen thaws from the top down, such as the liquid nitrogen that cryonics patients are stored in. Putting the head at the bottom is an extra measure of protection.
Oh, and notice that I avoid terms like popsicles, stiffs, Eskimo Pies and sno-cones as being politically incorrect.
Aren't you glad to hear Eskimo Pies are still around?
Of all the people who have been frozen, dating on back to the first one in 1967, none have been lost due to a power outage. But I just thought I'd mention it as an icebreaker. No pun intended.
So after the Big Chill, I went back to my old employer, which just so happens to be Blackwater. Born in North Carolina, same as me, although I'd like to think I'm a bit more decent. Blackwater looked at my resume, saw a lovely PR opportunity, put me through a bit of subliminal learning to catch me up with the modern world, and put me to work.
Incidentally, multiple subliminal sessions work best. If you want to remember information for just a week, it is probably best if sessions are spaced out over a day or two. On the other hand, if you want to remember information for a year, it's best for learning to be spaced out over about a month.
Why was I frozen?
United States laws from my time, just like in modern times, prevent freezing someone before he's legally dead.
Pause a moment to digest that.
I was legally dead.
That'll put a cramp in your Christmases, won't it?
What kind of person gets frozen? Well, you've got an initial investment which is pretty hefty, and then space and maintenance for the equipment. But if you're a rookie cop, an insurance salesman might convince your wife to sign you up for a policy that costs less than your cable TV bill.
His words.
On the one hand, the 200 plus who weren't successfully revived didn't get refunds on their policies.
On the other hand, if you're a workaholic cop who never watches TV, you can't get a refund on your cable bill either.
So the turbolift opened and I resumed my rounds. I was walking the first wheel –
Okay, a brief geography lesson for you. About the cheapest, easiest way to generate gravity on a starship is by rotation. The engineers create a hollow circle – we usually call them wheels – and then rotate it at just the right speed.
Think of those old circus rides that fling you up against the walls. Or a rock on the end of a string. Spin the string. The rock wants to fly away, but the string won't let it. That's how we do gravity on PEGASUS.
Yeah, it's called PEGASUS. It was named after our destination.
Never let it be said that government bureaucrats evolved an imaJudytion while I slept.
So the ship has four "wheels" that are in constant rotation. They've got the right speed and circumference to make the gravity earthlike. That also means we can still use the "fifth wheel" idiom.
I won't bore you with all the science, though, only what matters to the guard on foot patrol. Walking a complete circle is roughly a mile.
Another riddle.
Why do guards walk on rounds?
Gee, Barry, I don't know. Why do guards walk on rounds?
To get to the other side.
No, wait, that doesn't work.
You might be surprised at how much debate there was about the need for security guards – excuse me, Enforcement Personnel – on a starship. Considering the battery of tests that the crewmen go through, isn't having cops running around an admission that the tests are flawed somehow?
Well, even if we assume the tests are 99.9% accurate, somebody's gotta be around for the other 0.1%. The rest of the time, they can walk around and check on all the equipment that nobody else is looking at, just to make sure nothing's going to blow up.
So yeah, Enforcement Officers are just glorified safety inspectors most of the time. Same as we've always been.
What's weird about walking the wheels of PEGASUS is that you can look up and see a slight curvature. Your ceiling is a little smaller than your floor, which is just the opposite of being on Earth, where your floor is the curved ground and your ceiling is a sky with a slightly larger curve. Once you get used to that, if you ever do, it's spronkie.
The first wheel has the bridge, where I'll admit I do spend a bit too much time, but wouldn't you? It also has some of the crew quarters, but most of those are in the second wheel, including mine. The quarters on the first wheel don't allow cats.
I think you have to be warped to stay in the cat-free zone. Well, considering that we can't have dogs on the ship. They need a lot more food, a lot more exercise, and Enforcement Officers would spend all their time running around with pooper scoopers.
Plus there's a fine naval tradition of carrying cats on the ship for good luck.
So the first wheel has the bridge, the cat haters' crew quarters, our communications computers, half of our force field equipment, half of the weaponry which of course is strictly for defense, a section to keep the first wheel spinning, a big chunk of our computers, and the sick bay, which is where I was headed next.
Tell me you didn't just ask me about Ted Williams' head.
Neuropreservation means to only freeze the head. It's cheaper, it's easier, and the theory was that by the time we could thaw the head, we'd have the tech to grow a new body for it anyway.
Such a body would have to relearn motor skills, maybe, but it'd be younger than mine and without the scars. I've got cadaver tendon in my knee because of an old bullet wound. I am one of the younger crewmen, though, if you forget the years I was frozen. I'm only 58.
It turns out we developed the tech to thaw whole bodies first. Roughly 160 people were frozen in the 20th century, all still frozen, including Ted Williams but not Walt Disney. That was a myth.
Roughly 400 were frozen in the 21st century. All have been thawed, and 182 survived. We're a small but exclusive club. All full-body jobs. We don't quite have the tech to thaw a head yet. Maybe next year.
On May 1, 2123, Mars, Saturn and Uranus were all aligned. This was especially useful for ships leaving Earth to fly out of our solar system. They could slingshot off Mars' gravity, then slingshot off Saturn's gravity, then slingshot off Uranus's gravity.
That didn't quite apply to PEGASUS, however.
It's a nine-month trip from Earth to Mars, by the way. All voyages are slow getting started and then pick up speed from there.
Did you know that, if we could travel at the speed of light, we'd need seven hours to get to Pluto and about a year to leave our own solar system? Hey, it's a big place. Which, according to Gene Roddenberry, gives us lots of room to fuck up before we meet anyone else.
So anyway, PEGASUS stopped at Mars to pick up some supplies and crew, including yours truly. But at least we were able to slingshot around Saturn and Uranus. Which reminds me of another story.
"So we'll slingshot off Saturn, and some time after that we'll slingshot off Uranus," I said.
Commander Weinberg nodded. "You got it."
"Well, I'd certainly rather you slingshot off Uranus than slingshot off my anus."
"That does it. Get off my bridge."
Juvenile, isn't it? I'm trying to set a record for how many times I can get thrown off the bridge. I hear there's a betting pool. Nice to know humans haven't forgotten how to have fun while I was sleeping, isn't it?
Spell "I cup."
Get off my bridge.
Rip Van Winkle, eat your heart out.
Hey, do you know who we should've frozen? Richard Pryor. It's not like he couldn't afford it. Ah, well.
It's 1 AU (Astronomical Unit) from the Sun to Earth and 40 to Pluto. We didn't see Pluto on this trip – it was somewhere else – but it doesn't matter.
I'm from the 20th Century, right? Space was a dream for us. A few lucky astronauts and a few lucky bastards who paid a few million to joyride on a Soyuz. But in 2123, we've got astronauts who are jaded about anything in our entire solar system. They kinda sleepwalk until they hit the heliosphere or the Oort Cloud. Especially on a ship as cutting-edge as PEGASUS, where everybody's been out here before, except maybe some newbies in Enforcement like me.
Heck, I've seen newbies thinking that we couldn't go from Mars to Jupiter without dodging asteroids like a video game. Of course they're out there – our best source of mineral wealth yet – but you can't hit one without aiming for it.
Oh, and it takes longer to get from Mars to the Oort Cloud than from the Oort Cloud to Alpha Centauri, if you're going in that direction, which we're not.
Why Pegasus? I'll tell you later. But first, one more story. It's a short one, as the actress said to the bishop.
"Barry, why are you on my bridge?"
"Fighting a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way. Three different things, by the way."
"Go do it somewhere else, Superman."
"What's better than roses on your piano?"
"I really don't care."
"Two lips on your organ."
"Get off my bridge."
 
Chapter Two

One year earlier...

Perspective
by Barry Drake

Life is pretty damn rare. How rare? Let's think about that.
You start with a planet full of some funky stuff they call primordial soup, and then you wait a few billion years. Cyanobacteria and stromatolites evolve. They eat water and shit oxygen, which is a pretty good trick. Do some more waiting and the environment will change enough for some larger animals to evolve. Hell, do a whole lot of waiting. On over 99.999% of planets in the universe, we're still waiting. On most, we'll wait forever.
Let's do our waiting on Earth so I can keep writing. I've got a word count to meet here.
On Earth, the microscopic world has more numbers, more species, and more sheer mass than the plant and animal kingdoms combined. An overwhelming majority. Even though they're teeny tiny little muthers, they outweigh us. Yeah, that's how many microbes there are. Not only that, but we couldn't exist without them. We need them in our guts, and there are far more bacteria in your body than people on Earth.
Not only that, but we're damn lucky not to be extinct. Damn lucky. Forget the dinosaurs for a minute. It took a whole bunch of weird-ass flukes for mammals to replace reptiles as the dominant animal species, but forget that part. Most species of life become extinct. Most. We're a fraction of a fraction of the 1% who aren't extinct yet. And do note that I used the word "yet." Every species that isn't extinct yet will be. So here we are, walking around this spinning ball of dirt on our two little legs not knowing just how much of a fluke we really are.
Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. Let's squish that into a day. Life begins around 4 in the morning, with those single-celled organisms. For the next 16 hours, nothing happens.
Now it's 8:30 at night, the day is almost over, and we've finally got sea plants. Thrilling, isn't it? Now wait until 10 at night and we finally get some plants on the land, and then some critters. And wow, time's running out fast.
It's 10:24 now. We've got big forests and little insects. At 11:00 we finally get those dinosaurs. Mammals at 11:49. The very first humans, dumber than Dan Quayle, show up one minute and 17 seconds before midnight.
On a scale like that, Barry Drake, you ain't shit.

My classmate looked up from my little writing sample. "Who's Dan Quayle?"
I could only shake my head. "Judy, Judy, Judy." But of course she didn't recognize my incredibly accurate Cary Grant impersonation either. Being this old really sucks sometimes.
Knowledge is something we can get from subliminal learning these days, which is pretty convenient. I never was too good in school because it was so boring. I was that kid you remember who was always in the principal's office, either for beating up bullies or making teachers wish I'd lose a fight every now and then. So yeah, plug me in and dump a few encyclopedias into my brain, it's a dream come true.
But using the knowledge is something that still only comes from practice, which is what we were doing on a slow transport ship from Earth to Mars.
Nine months. You could get pregnant on Earth and have the baby on Mars if you wanted, or vice versa, but since it seemed highly unlikely I'd ever get pregnant –
Oh, sorry about that. I reach too hard for a joke sometimes. It's because I've got nothing else to do around here. The people in this century are great. They seem a bit more mature, certainly more educated, not as many assholes. But no great friendships for me, or maybe I'm just homesick, or maybe I never was good at relationships anyway.
Oh, there's no "maybe" in that. Hell really is other people.
But now that everybody I meet is so damn nice, I get bored. The grass is always dying on both sides of the fence, or something.
"I take it you're referring to someone who isn't very bright," Judy said as I rolled up my computer and slipped it into my backpack.
Yep, that's right. I rolled up my computer. It's like a big piece of laminated paper with a full-sized keyboard on one half and a good-sized screen on the other. Nice little fold in the middle that acts like a fold when I want it to, so the screen is upright. The technology is very spronkie here. Too bad I still can't type worth a shit.
"How about Thomas Midgley?" Judy suggested.
"How about I take you to Starbucks?" I replied. "I'll buy you a Big Mac."
Judy rolled her expressive blue eyes. "Starbucks doesn't sell Big Macs, Barry."
I felt my lips twitching into that stupid grin of mine. "I know. I'm older than Starbucks. How about we just hang out so I can make the guys jealous?"
Class had ended five minutes earlier, but as usual we were the last two to leave. Back in my time –
You'll have to forgive me for constantly reminiscing about the place, but I spent most of my life there.
Given my school history, eventually my brother had to review all my work before I turned it in. When I attended the Police Academy, I got him to type all my notes because hey, he was dumb enough to do it. Egghead.
Part of the sales pitch for this deep freeze that shot me into the future was that you'd wake up into the welcoming arms of family. Which in my case sounded like total crap.
I grew up with Mom and Matt – my brother – and managed to outlive both even before I was frozen in the year 2017 at the ripe old age of 52. Neither Matt nor I had kids. I was pretty much a loner after Mom and Matt died, and for the most part I still am. So nope, no family reunions here. I didn't feel like looking up the Drakes when I thawed. Making me a perfect candidate for the space race.
But anyway, Doctor Judy Bagshaw, European Space Agency and future head of the medical department on a newly christened ship called PEGASUS, was filling Matt's old role. I learn better that way.
"So who is this Thomas guy?" I asked as we walked.
"Thomas Midgley," she replied. "Someone from your time. First he invented lead additives in gasoline, poisoning a bunch of people and just flat-out lying to government agencies for the money. Then he invented chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and punched holes in the ozone, lying to make some money again. Finally, when he contracted polio, he invented a contraption full of motorized pulleys to turn him in bed. The cords tangled him up and strangled him to death."
"Sounds like he should've invented that one first."
"Well, to agree with you seems to violate the spirit of my Hippocratic Oath, but yeah, that is a nice thought."
So I walked past a mirror and saw my weathered brown skin and short gray hair and...
No, I'm joking again. Even I can write better than that.
Oh yeah, writing. Matthew Drake's profession. That's my big brother. I'm a cop. You remember what I said about beating up bullies? Hell, somebody had to.
And when you think back to those childhood classmates of yours who were always in the principal's office for beating the shit out of somebody, some became dirtbags and some became cops. And my inner cynic says some became both, but we don't listen to him. Not even when he's right.
So anyway, I have a mental image of myself as being six feet tall, which I am, and 180 pounds, which I'm not. I was through most of my adult life, and it kinda sucked. I worked out all the time, ate healthy, got my body fat way down, but the muscle just wouldn't come. I'm what the trainers call a "hard gainer." Must be a Cherokee thing, I decided – I've got a little bit in me – just like my high cheekbones.
Cops should look intimidating. Going back even further, as an MP and then a jail deputy, I really needed to look intimidating. But nope, no luck. Not big enough.
Well, my eyes. A cold shade of pale blue, brother Matt wrote somewhere or other. I've stared down Dobermans, and made children cry just by looking at them. Since I don't like kids, that's a good thing. Over 30 years as a cop and then a rent-a-cop, tall, thin, muscular, and intense, if we want to be charitable about it. Replace "intense" with a bit of profanity if we'd rather be honest.
But when they thawed my chilly willy in 2118, I grew. A bit wrinkly in the face, of course. Ravages of AIDS. Not so mean in the eyes. I guess we all mellow with age unless we die first. But damn, I gained about 50 pounds in a few months. Puberty at 52? Better living? Side effect of something medical? Nobody knows. But it still feels weird, six years later.
My partner walking down the campus halls of this little transport ship, which has the rather unimaJudytive name of GALAGA, is a large Dutch lady who I enjoy being around. Back in my century of origin, we'll call it, I was what you'd call prejudiced. Not against skin color or nationality, but against the fat, the stupid, the old, the ugly...
There. I said it.
Hire the handicapped. They may not get much work done, but they're fun to watch.
Yep. I'm evil.
No, actually, I'm not evil. I'm just an equal opportunity asshole.
Judy's smile seems to always be there. She has stunning blue eyes that I've mentioned before, and curly hair that's still brown even though she's older than my gray-headed self. She's my height, and had she been alive in my century, she'd probably have been what I would've called fat. Why yes, I was an ass. She's bigger than my out-of-date self-image of six feet tall and 180 pounds. But hey, everybody's taller in the future. Nutrition, quite probably.
And while we're on the subject, in most of the science fiction from my time, space was for the young. That is so wrong. When I turned 18, I went through Boot Camp and AIT, and I was still 18 when the US Army gave me a gun and told me that sometimes I'd be allowed to kill people. That's messed up, isn't it? Some 18-year-olds haven't even gotten their first hard-on yet.
I'm descended from a long line of centenarians, which is unusual for someone born in 1964, but here everybody's got centenarians climbing the branches of their family trees. Sixty is middle-aged, and I'm almost there. Daddy always told me I wouldn't have any sense until I was at least 50, and that seems to be the thinking in the world's various space programs too. I'm certainly calmer now, with a bit of "I've seen this before" rather than "What the fuck?" as my natural state of mind.
But hey, I do still cling to my inborn prejudice against dirtbags, rude fucks, and assholes. And stupid people. It's nice to know some things will never change.
Oh, one more comment on my age.
I was born in 1964. When they froze me in 2017, I was 52 (almost 53). When they thawed me in 2118, I was either knocking on 53 or knocking on 154 years old, depending on who you ask. Now it's 2123 and nobody gives me birthday cakes anymore because it'd be hell figuring out how many candles to use.
But not as difficult as figuring out where Mecca is.
A few minutes after we left the classroom, Judy was drinking something overloaded with chocolate, sugar, and caffeine. I've never understood the attraction of whipped cream, or sweets in general, or paying a few bucks for a cup of coffee when you can just turn on the coffeemaker at home. Atmosphere, I know, but I've never been big on noticing atmosphere. Call me a crotchety old coot if you want, but I was born this way.
"PEGASUS isn't the most inspired name I've ever heard for a starship," I commented.
I was drinking water, by the way. I've got a bit of a caffeine addiction, but it's strictly for mornings. Oh, and when you're flying in space, it's best not to think too much about the drinking water comes from. Just a friendly bit of advice there.
"It's better than GALAGA," Judy replied.
"Barely." I remembered a videogame from my time called Galaga – I have always kicked ass at all videogames – but I doubt anybody cared anymore.
"Will you be on PEGASUS?"
"I never know where Blackwater will send me until they tell me."
"Really."
"I mean, they don't tell me very far in advance. Lots of different posts, no long-term assignments like yours. I've never worked on a starship, except when it was docked."
"Do you want to?"
"I think it'd be great, just going out there."
I didn't have to state the obvious. Just being on a ship to Mars is pretty damn special for someone almost as old as NASA. I remember when the old unmanned landers were landing there.
"You know," I added, "Blackwater may not be perfect, but I'm sure they're better to work for than Yellow Water."
Sometimes people actually groan.
I lifted my glass of water in a mock salute. "Here's to water recycling. Turning yesterday's coffee into today's coffee."
"Delicious coffee, too."
"Oh Judy, you're no fun at all."
"You just don't know me very well."
That left me speechless for a moment, but I cleverly covered it with a lame ass question. "Any particular reason why the ship's called PEGASUS?"
"You really don't know?"
"Afraid not."
"How is that even possible? It's all over the news."
"Call it a lifestyle choice. I usually work about 60 or 80 hours, so –"
"What? Why so much?"
"Maybe I need a hobby," I admitted. "Or a dog."
Judy's smile grew for a moment. "Never mind. PEGASUS. This could be a two-latte story."
"Go for it."
"Let's start at the beginning."
"Adam and Eve? Sperm and egg? Big Bang?"
Judy shook her head in mock exasperation. "Why do we go into space?"
"Because it's there."
"Barry."
"Oh, sorry, you're being serious. I can think of three reasons. Because we've trashed Earth's environment and need to go fuck up some other planet next, because we like mining asteroids for mineral wealth which we can use to improve our quality of life while meanwhile trashing our environment even faster, and because it's an election year."
"I swear, you're a born cynic."
"I know." I felt my grin again. I hate my grin.
People outside the US think we all look like a bunch of mental patients smiling all the time. Good thing I never learned how. Well, okay, there's an instinct, but not all this trained-up body language.
"Life," Judy answered." "We have it, we want it, we need it, we love it, and we're looking for more of it. Are we alone out there? It's one of the big questions that drives us. In a way, it always has, but especially now."
"Why do you say that?"
"We've done what, during all of my lifetime and all of yours, just seemed impossible. We can travel to other stars now, and we have. Our own world is a long long way from perfect, but we've managed to put aside enough of our differences to go to other worlds. And I think we always felt we'd find someone out there waiting for us."
"I love your accent, by the way. There were no Dutch ladies in North Carolina when I was growing up."
"Thanks. I didn't hear any North Carolinian accents when I was growing up in Holland. The fact that you're American and I'm Dutch, of course, would be nothing compared to the difference between being from Earth and being..."
"Vulcan? Klingon? Minbari?"
"Exactly. But we've been to Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A and B –"
"No sign of Lando."
"– Barnard's Star, Wolf 359, Luyten, Sirius, Ross, Procyon, Tau Ceti... No life. Nothing but us."
"That we know of."
"Right. You don't just drop in, plant a flag, and discover whether or not a place has life. And yet, we just keep moving on to the next because we have such short attention spans. You know, there could still be something more intelligent than us in Earth's oceans that we don't know about, but we've mostly quit looking."
"Because they haven't told us to quit shitting in their water by now?"
"Because we're impatient. And anyway, it doesn't matter why. We just haven't."
"Didn't Einstein say we couldn't travel faster than light?"
Judy nodded. "I probably don't know any more about physics than you do, but yeah. The answer I've heard is that he was right, we can't outrun light, but the Weinberg Drive works in a place where light travels a whole lot faster than it does here."
"Hmm. I actually understand that answer. I like it. I suppose I could ask a geek for the details, but I probably wouldn't know what he was talking about, and you smell a whole lot better anyway."
Her smile grew.
"Not that I have anything against geeks. My brother was one. I didn't always know what he was talking about either."
"So. Are we alone in the universe? I think you'd have to be crazy to think so, but for most people that used to be more of a philosophical, intellectual position. Now it's turning into something they actually feel, in their hearts, and maybe even a little bit of an obsession."
"Like why the Detroit Lions still suck at football."
I like being able to frustrate someone with my BS and making them laugh at the same time. Or almost laugh, usually.
"Do you know about Frank Drake?" Judy asked.
"My uncle."
Judy's also a person who sometimes rolls her eyes. "Not that one. The other Frank Drake."
"Oh, sure, household name."
"He came up with the equation about the chance of there being intelligent life somewhere else in the cosmos."
"Oh, okay, I just didn't know his name."
"Yeah. You divide the number of stars by a million or a billion or whatever for chances of the star having planets, chances of one of those planets being the same distance from its sun as Earth is, chances of that planet being the right age, chances that planet has oxygen, etc. etc., and you get a very very very tiny chance of finding intelligent life at our relative level of development."
"Very tiny, as the actress said to the bishop."
"Tinier than your essay about perspective. But then you divide that tiny little number into just how big the universe is and it looks like there are billions of planets with our type of life and at our level of civilization. It's just not possible to grasp the size of the universe."
"Infinity is only a word. I want to know why it takes so long to walk a circuit around the place I'm guarding today."
"Right. So if there's so many planets with people like us, why can't we find them?"
"Size of the universe," I said. "We've just got to keep looking."
"Exactly. At first, the scientists and the Rambos agreed on this. The scientists wanted to find that intelligent life for scientific curiosity, and the Rambos wanted to find it to assess its potential as a threat. So when we got close enough to light speed to visit space instead of just looking at it, we started looking."
"And not finding."
"Right. But Barry, think about this."
"Your coffee's getting cold."
"Thanks." She drank some. "Think about the difference between inhabited and inhabitable."
I did.
"Yeah," she said. "Scientists would love to find life out there. Any life, at this point. The survivalists and the Rambos want to find places we could live on but where there's nobody and nothing."
"You mean colonizing."
Judy nodded. "That's what's been happening. Earth orbits a Type G star. The closest star to us, Alpha Centauri, is a Type G star. It's even got a planet like Earth, except that we didn't find any life on it. So the Rambos decided it needed a military base."
"Your tax dollars at work."
"Centauri A is part of a triple star system. The other two are red dwarves. Most stars are. We started at the closest stars, the three Centauri stars, and worked outward. But then we decided to just rush things along, skip a bunch of red dwarves, and jump right on out to Tau Ceti."
"A G star?"
Judy nodded. "The closest G star to Earth. Just under 12 light years. There are 18 star systems closer, but we've skipped most. Most known star systems in the galaxy are binary. Our sun is a bit of a freak because it's a solitary star. Tau Ceti is also solitary. And the closest Type G star. The SETI people have been in love with it for centuries."
"SETI."
"Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. We've pointed radio antennas at Tau Ceti for centuries without hearing anything. Most likely place to hear something, most have always said. So we went there."
"What did we find?"
"Some planets without life. Unless it's hiding, but never mind. We didn't find it. Like the planets in Centauri, the planets in Tau Ceti don't have heavy metals. They're probably younger than our sun, too. So we guessed that heavy metals are important and we've given up on finding life there. And, of course, built more military outposts.
"We like Type A V stars too, by the way. They're burning hydrogen, which makes them significantly younger than our sun, which burns helium. With Type A V stars, such as Vega, we can be pretty confident we'll find inhabitable planets where we're the only life in town."
"The sigh in your voice tells me we're getting to Pegasus now."
"Yeah. Centauri is about four light years away. Tau Ceti is almost 12. The next closest Type G is Pegasus, which is 50 light years from Earth. I don't know how many closer systems we're skipping to go to Pegasus instead. It's a little older than our sun, so in theory it has the right heavy metals. And there is a planet orbiting Pegasus that's not too far and not too close, which probably has the right mass, the right radiation screening, probably not a gas giant like most planets in the universe."
"Even in our own system."
"Right. Once you pass Mars, it's all gas giants."
"So the scientists are confident again."
Judy nodded. "And the Rambos are obsessed. So we're going to Pegasus, on a ship called PEGASUS, to investigate a planet called 51 Pegasi b."
"Clever."
"Most people call it Bellerophon. But someone decided naming the ship that would make it too hard for some people to pronounce."
"I hate stupid people."
"You're not a nice man, Barry."
"Nope. Refresh my memory on who Bellerophon is."
"He tamed Pegasus, rode him into battle, killed the Chimera, dropped boulders on the Amazons, killed a pirate and a bunch of assassins, got a big head and tried to fly to Olympus. Zeus sent a fly to sting Pegasus, and Bellerophon felt back to Earth and lived out his life as a sad, blind cripple."
"Oh, that's right. Another Greek ass kicker."
Judy smiled. "And also the traditional symbol of British Airborne forces. The planet Bellerophon is about 1200 degrees Celsius, with at least half the mass of Jupiter, but confidence is high. We can deal with those temperatures, and if it's another gas giant, it's probably got a good useful moon like Titan in our own system. One of the US Space Force's favorite outposts."
"You mean Starfleet?"
Judy chuckled. "Yeah. Them."
Life.
After all the science fantasy, the science fiction, the 20th Century classrooms, the 20th Century TV programs on PBS, a cryonic freeze that let me leap ahead 101 years for a serious mindfuck, an amazing amount of subliminal learning, many hours of classroom time, years of guarding starship-building facilities, and a nine-month trip to Mars...
I really never felt the marvel of what all this space travel really meant until here and now, watching Judy finish her second latte in a tacky cookie-cutter spacefaring Starbucks.
That's when I decided to ask Blackwater to station me aboard PEGASUS.
 

Chapter Three

Way back when...

A uniformed Sheriff's Deputy patrolled the halls of a large county jail. It could have been any prison in any town, at any time. Time and place lost all meaning to the men who lived there.
All the inmates had to look forward to were their trials. Those who were found guilty would be transferred to a regular prison to serve a year or 10 or a life sentence, perhaps the death penalty for the worst of the lot. To those who were found innocent, there was always the hope that they would find freedom at the end of the road.
To those who guarded those cells, there was no such hope. True, they were only there for 10 hours out of 24. But half of the remaining 14 hours were spent sleeping badly, and the other half were spent trying to forget what they'd seen inside. For them there was no parole, no chance of a jury saying not guilty and sending them on their way.
This particular jail deputy was named Barry Drake. Yeah, that's me. I was 20 years old, fresh out of the Army. The place was North Carolina. The year was 1984, and the world was neither brave nor new. Same shit different day.
When I was at home, I tried to push aside memories of the jail. The strip searches that meant probing strange anuses with a gloved hand, the overcrowding, and the riots. I had learned long ago to walk in the center of the hall, as far as possible from the cells on either side, but sometimes that wasn't enough. The inmates still spit on me, or splashed me with cups of rank, dark yellow piss. Never the almost clear variety.
But now that I was in the jail, I tried to push aside thoughts of home, and of my life before becoming a jail deputy. The two years I'd spent as a Military Policeman in the Army. The way I'd returned home to my mother and brother as something of a hero. The way my brother had worked so hard to get me this job, doing all that research back here in North Carolina while I was still stationed in Oklahoma. The months of waiting to get out of the jail and onto the streets as a regular cop, and the way my boundless optimism had given way to cold hard reality. The beautiful wife who kissed me goodbye before I left for work every day, the same wife who had convinced me to leave the Army.
No, it's not fair to blame Cathy for that. The Army had already promoted me off the roads and into a desk job. That's no life for a real cop. But hell, neither is this.
Since I was on the job, and wearing the uniform, I pushed all that shit aside. My "attitude" was firmly in place, the attitude that allowed me to survive my life behind bars. A life I had chosen.
I chose this.
"Hey screw!" someone yelled.
I turned slowly to glare at the inmate, a cold rage burning in my pale blue eyes. Don't fuck with me. That was my attitude, plain and simple. I like simple. Do not fuck with me.
"I did your wife!" the inmate yelled. "She begged for more. Up the ass! she pleaded. Please, big man, do me right up my ass!"
I clamped down on my rage. The inmate—Croom was his name—was simply trying to get under my skin. The worst of the lot had always done that, and always would. But just for a moment, my rage slipped through. No one knew—no one—that Cathy had left me. She was shacking up with someone not unlike this dirtbag who was trying to fuck with me now.
"You know what she told me?" Croom continued. "She said she'd done it for all these years with a little boy, but now she finally knew what it meant to be with a real man."
On both sides of the narrow hall, the inmates laughed, but I didn't notice. My eyes—my whole being—focused on Croom. I felt myself turning into the the cold, hard embodiment of impersonal hatred.
"I'm surprised you were interested in my wife," I said quietly.
My curse was that I looked so damn young. I was 20 but I looked more like 17. Six feet and muscular, but too damn small. It's pretty important to look intimidating in police work, but I don't. It sucks.
I sized up Croom. Five feet six and thin enough to be a jockey, but something in his face said he was old. Dark hair, fast-growing facial and body hair, and a worldliness about his dark brown eyes that I probably lacked. I wanted to punch him in the face.
"Why's it surprise you?" Croom taunted. "She that ugly?"
"No, I just heard that you only do little schoolgirls. Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed."
I deliberately turned away from Croom, ignored his further shouts, and walked through the door at the end of the hall.
Welcome to life behind bars, dirtbag. I say a few magic words—child molester, cop killer, stool pigeon—and the animals in here administer their own brand of justice. The biggest part of my job is breaking up fights with a fire hose, but just for you I'll do it real slow.
Was it guilt I felt? Hell no. It was the rush of adrenaline that comes from fucking up some asshole who desperately needs it. Or, if you prefer, the thrill of justified revenge.
Just as I closed the door behind me, an alarm sounded. Above me, a red light flashed.
"Riot in Block H!" someone shouted over the jail-wide intercom. "Repeat, riot in Block H!"
Fuck.
I ran toward Block H, a solitary confinement block. Sixteen cells, eight on each side. How bad could a riot be with only 16 or less inmates? I knew better than to wonder.
We deputies were unarmed, of course. With more than 800 inmates in a facility designed for 400, and only 15 deputies on duty at any given time, it would be far too easy for one of those inmates to take away a deputy's firearm.
I burst through the door with my club in his hand. I was greeted by the sight of 12 deputies, 16 opened cells, and 32 inmates.
Fuck.
The deputy closest to me was Preece. Preece wasn't any taller than me, but he was much larger. I'd spent hours in the gym, trying to bulk up to Preece's size, but something in my genes wouldn't allow me to add that kind of muscle.
Preece clubbed an inmate on the back of his head. The inmate fell. Another lunged at Preece, pinning his club-wielding arm to his side. I slammed my own club against the inmate's skull, and the man fell to the ground.
"Thanks," Preece said with a grin. That damned grin. It'd take a bazooka to blow it off his face.
"What happened?"
"What's it look like?"
Preece ducked a wild roundhouse punch and slammed the end of his club into the swinger's stomach. The inmate doubled over, and Preece snapped the club up into his chin. He slumped to the floor.
"Looks like—" I stopped yelling long enough to block an arm with my club. I kicked my attacker in the groin, then slammed the club against his head. The inmate fell to the floor. "Looks like I should've been here to start with."
"Neil thought we could handle it."
"Neil thought wrong."
Preece ducked under a punch and shattered his attacker's knee. "Obviously."
Preece and I were giving better than we were receiving, but we seemed to me to be the only two.
"Two men each in the solitary cells?" I questioned.
"That was the plan."
A massive black man charged at me, wielding a club he'd taken from a fallen jail deputy. I raised my own club in both hands to block the blow. The inmate's club split mine through the center and continued its downward path to strike my shoulder. The bastard was strong. Sharp pain ricocheted through me as I hit the floor.
The inmate raised his club again to finish the job. I tried to cover my face, but I don't know if I did. The pain shooting through my shoulder was about the only thing I really noticed.
Some large, uniformed legs stepped over me. Then someone swung, then someone else grunted as two sticks collided. A moment later, the massive black man hit the floor beside me.
Preece offered me a hand, then yanked me to my feet. By my good arm, fortunately.
"I owe you one," I mumbled. Best I could do without screaming.
"No shit."
We had the advantage of heavy wooden clubs and months of combat training at the Police Academy, and I also had my MP training. But the inmates had the advantage of sheer numbers.
Preece, a small young female deputy whose name I didn't know, and I found ourselves surrounded by nine inmates with clubs. The small corridor stank of sweat, blood, and adrenaline, and the cement floor was slick with blood. Ours and theirs, probably.
Nine to three. It didn't look good.
Moments before the ass-kicking began, the door that led into Cell Block H burst open and 15 jail deputies rushed into the melee.
"What the—?" began Preece.
"Shift change," I realized. "Sometimes we get lucky."
The fighting that followed was just as brutal as that which had preceded it. A few more of the deputies fell, but in the end we'd locked all 32 of the bastards into those 16 solitary confinement cells. A doctor and two deputies rushed from cell to cell tending to the beaten inmates while another doctor tended to the battered deputies.
I was hustled out of the cell block and into a nearby storage room, where the young female deputy cleaned and bandaged my shoulder. She had a freckled face and short blonde hair. She looked younger than me but twice as confident.
"No broken bones," she stated. "Just some bleeding. Keep it covered until the bleeding stops and you should be okay. Maybe go see a real doctor and get it checked out."
"What's your name?"
"Amanda."
"Why are you bandaging my shoulder? I thought you were a jail deputy."
"I am. But I used to be a Girl Scout."
"Lucky me."
"You are." She nodded. "The doctors are busy with the other deputies and the inmates. I'd guess the doctors have some deputies with them who know first aid, to help a bit and to subdue the inmates while they're at it."
"This leaves us a bit short-handed, doesn't it?"
"We'll manage. Go to the hospital and then go home."
"Doctor's orders?"
Amanda met my gaze with a smile that she probably didn't feel. "Absolutely."
"Was this Neil's fucking idea?"
"What can we do? Too many inmates, not enough cells."
"This is fucked."
"What would you suggest? Taking a few of them home with you?"

~*~

I like waking up cold. I like going to sleep cold. Which is good, because it's freezing in space, and the cooler I can stand my quarters, the less electricity I use.
I've always liked sleeping in a cold room. Being cold makes me think of Christmas, which is a pretty happy time.
Also, if I happen to sleep on my stomach, like I happened to be doing at this particular moment, I might be lucky enough to wake up with a cat on my back.
Yep. She was there.
That particular dream seemed real because it was. It had happened 139 years ago. Amazing that I could remember it so well and recreate it so perfectly.
I wish I couldn't. It brought back bad memories.
Amanda's words, for example, were absolutely right. Not physically, but mentally those damn inmates always came home with me.
But when you consider how much shit had flowed under the bridge since then, it was time to let them go. They were all dead anyway.
I focused on the purring cat on my back and went back to sleep.