Chapter Three
Could have
“I can’t believe you are using an eighty-year-old rebuilt ship for this mission. What were you thinking Vinmil?” Branic said in a venomous tone. He looked once more at the databoard in his slender hand and hoped the deep disapproval he felt reached his eyes. “Do you realize just how much StelCom will ultimately have to cough up just for today’s little test flight?”
Director Vinmil didn't respond to his words and after several long moments Branic looked up from the databoard and, for what seemed like the eleventh time in as many sub-units, locked his gaze on her reflection in the shuttle window before them.
Branic and she sat in the roomy fore section of the shuttle that was roughly oval in shape, with plenty of leg room and a total of four seats for passengers. The aforementioned large window before them allowed a 180 degrees view from side to side and from 100 degrees from top to the floor in front of them dominated their end of the shuttle. A slim auxiliary console stretched out from the wall next to each chair and displayed a summary of what the pilots were doing. The pilots, two humans, sat on a raised platform at the aft of the shuttle surrounded by consoles and instruments and were doing an excellent job of ignoring the conversation of their superiors. To the side of the pilot’s platform was the airlock. Branic quickly smothered a vision of Vinmil's alien body flying head first out the outer doors. He shivered ever so slightly at the dark thought and let it go.
Branic, however, was human and proud of it. On the shorter side of average and on the thin side of slim. Vinmil, as far as he could tell, was on the upper side of tall for her race, the Vakaal, a species he had yet to encounter in his short political career as Supreme Director of StelCom. Now that he thought about it, when they were introduced at the shuttle's docking hatch, he had been overwhelmed by the sheer size of her two-meter tall frame. In a galaxy full of life from typical human to utter strangeness, he had only met a handful of beings from a very small number of those races. But so far, Vinmil's people had ranked at near the top of his list as one of the strangest he had met.
To his eye, Vinmil resembled a large inverted water droplet with thick tentacle-like limbs grouped in threes equidistantly from each other around her body. Her legs sprouted out of the base of her body like a tripod, her arms were two-thirds of the way up the torso and at the peak of her bulbous top side; three eye stocks surrounded her tri slit mouth flaps. All of this was colored in tones of pale tan with dark patterns of green spots that seemed to change shade depending on her mood. She wore a fine mesh adorned with large blue-gray metal disks that hung loosely around most of her body. Branic had seen a small octopus once at an aquarium on Tova IV and he couldn't help but think of her people as large, landing roaming version of that endangered species.
Vinmil turned an eye towards Branic’s own reflection then. He caught her movement and coughed slightly, forcing his eyes away from her gaze. He had been staring. 'Damn' he jabbed a bony finger at the upper right corner of his databoards flickering screen and frowned again. “I just can’t believe this. You could have handled this much better.”
Vinmil sighed heavily then, causing her lip flaps to vibrate subtly as she closed all three of her eyes in what he could only surmise was an expression of exasperation for her people. As he watched, she took a deep breath and slowly opened her eyes to stare back at him. “Sir, if you will…”
Branic furrowed his manicured eyebrows and flicked his black irises up to Vinmil’s slightly swaying eye stocks as he growled in a low tone. “You will address me as Supreme Director or, if you must, Doctor – I hold degrees in exo-commerce and business finance, but you are never, ever, to call me Sir.”
The screen of the databoard flashed just then, drawing his frustrated gaze back to the file he was studying which took some of the heat from his voice as he continued. “I realize I am new to StelCom Vinmil and that my predecessor had a more informal way of doing things, I appreciate that. It’s just that I hate being called Sir.”
“As you wish – Doctor,” Vinmil replied in a neutral tone. Turning one of her eyes away from Branic, she scanned the shuttles readouts before her. With little effort, she reached out with her primary arm and tapped out a slight course correction through the local shipyard traffic.
Branic meanwhile continued to mutter under his breath as he scratched quickly at his neatly trimmed Vandyke beard. “If only I had been in office a month earlier I could have made StelCom’s operations much more efficient and increased the chances for success and higher returns, particularly on the Third Galaxy Mission.”
“With all due respect Doctor; the Third Galaxy mission has had our best people on it from the beginning,” Vinmil said in a smooth and controlled voice.
Branic’s chuckle rattled along the curved cabin walls as his eyebrows rose higher on his forehead. “Your best people? I wouldn’t use that phrase to describe this lot.” He again tapped the databoard and shook his head. “Definitely not the best.”
A small pleasure craft crossed their flight path suddenly. The shuttle shook for several long moments as the pilots hurried to adjust their course.
“And why do you say that?” She asked in an exasperated tone as she reached out to her console and overrode the pilots long enough to fix their course as three more ships were suddenly bearing down on them. The shuttle shook even more sharply for a brief sub-unit before returning to a smooth flight once more.
“Ahem…well for starters the crew of the Starhawk has seen better days just like their ship,” Branic replied plainly as he let go of his console now that the shuttle had stopped shaking. “I haven’t seen a more mismatched bunch of beings in a long time.”
“They’ve worked well together for many years,” Vinmil stated with a touch of veiled indignation. “They have proven themselves on more than one occasion to be very capable.”
Branic’s eyes flicked over her dismissively and then took in the spacescape beyond their shuttle. “Well, I see it differently." He tapped his data board and frowned. "Take this Captain Kreelin, a baltek and quite a stubborn one at that.”
“He has been known to disagree with me on occasion,” Vinmil said simply.
“He also can go off on an impulsive hunch if he thinks he is right, only to have it blow up later.” Branic reached out and tapped a control on the console once more and the image from his databoard was projected onto the window in front of them.
In the image, Kreelin was dressed in an outdated, worn rust colored StelCom officer’s uniform that fit his large barrel-shaped humanoid body unflatteringly. His massive head was just as wide and thick as his body, giving Kreelin the appearance of not having any neck. The most obvious and truly alien looking feature was Kreelin’s great eye mass. A roughly oval-shaped feature of graduating dark squiggles, lines, and splotches that radiated out from a deep, almost bruised, purple center that faded into the pale toned skin of the rest of his equally broad face. Below this eye were two tri-slit nostrils and then a long thin mouth that cut almost two-thirds of the way across his face. All this was topped off with a tuft of closely cropped brown hair on his crown as well as three-digit hands and boots.
“I’ll never get used to Balteks,” Branic said finally, shuddering slightly.
“Pardon me?” Vinmil asked cautiously as she turned a narrowing eye back to him. “You have something against Balteks?”
Branic blinked once slowly as he licked his drying lips. “What? You mean beyond the fact that one of history’s darkest, most malevolent beings, the Great Betrayer, belonged to that race? That the Betrayer is still presumed alive and dangerous and the Balteks don’t seem the least bit interested in finding him? Or that until three weeks ago StelCom was led by Craylash, a baltek that murdered a political rival during one of their barbaric rituals. Most beings have debates and no one gets hurt let alone killed. So, no, I have no problems in general with Balteks. It’s that eye; it’s so very unnatural looking,” Branic said in a meeker tone than he intended.
“If that is so then why did you take this posting?" Vinmil asked in a confounded voice. "Surely you knew that you would have to interact with many races, a majority of which are not humanoid, particularly in your position.”
“Why else? The pay is good as well as the small fact that the Supreme Minister and I are very close,” Branic replied matter-a-factly. “But back to this Captain Kreelin. I see that he used to be one of your-excuse me-our top investigators until seven years ago. He then took a six-month leave of absence after which he returned to StelCom with a request for a transfer to the exploration division, also under your command. Since then he has gone from promising officer to just a mediocre, past his prime, professional joke.”
“Captain Kreelin is one of the most decorated officers in recent StelCom history. If you read his file thoroughly then you know that his last investigative assignment ended badly. Members of the Dorrn Syndicate, one of the largest human crime organizations in the frontier, killed his wife. The suspected murderer and leader of the family, Averaus Dorrn, was set free on technicalities.”
Vinmil paused, visibly trying to not lose her temper. But she continued in a voice far more pained than before. “It devastated him. Kreelin had been hunting the Dorrns for several years at that point, but after Jesseen’s death all he wanted to do was resign but he was talked into taking the exploration assignment and he’s been a model officer ever since.”
“Then why does his file show a recent rise in crew complaints?” Branic asked sharply as he flashed the databoard at her. “One officer, a lieutenant Toli, has been very vocal.”
Vinmil kept her eyes on the flickering console readouts and away from Branic’s databoard and dark glare. “That would be Kreelin’s son.”
Branic’s eyebrows shot up again, his eyelids fluttered quickly, as he looked at the file once more. “His son is serving under him?”
“Yes,” Vinmil said with a tone of detachment. “Toli is a brilliant engineer. He has managed to keep the Starhawk from becoming obsolete and has made that ship one of the fastest, farthest-reaching vessels at our command.”
“If he’s that brilliant, he should be serving on a capital ship not this out of date survey-runner,” Branic stated emphatically as he waved his hand back towards the databoard. “Anyways, let’s see what we have for the rest of the crew.” Branic tapped on the screen and the image of an automate replaced Kreelin’s. The sleek, brushed chrome body was a stark contrast to the earthy and worn appearance of the standard StelCom spacers uniform. “An automate first officer?”
“His name is Harvey. Yes, he’s been a commissioned officer for close to twelve years now,” Vinmil said with an indifferent pitch. “He’s been on Kreelin’s team for a long time.”
Harvey stood just under a meter and a half tall and his body shape was more or less humanoid. His long, thin limbs connected to small, spherical joints and his face was featureless save for a single, off-center right red eye and on the left, a descending row of bars of light.
“Doesn’t it make you feel a little uncomfortable trusting a machine to fill a living crewmen’s place on any ship,” Branic asked softly, “particularly that of first officer?”
“Not at all,” Vinmil said brusquely. “It took automates three hundred years to gain a measure of tolerance from the Alliance membership after their arrival from the Second Galaxy. Their rights and status as living, sentient life forms were laid to rest right before the Alliance fell.”
“Some would say that was the first stage of failure for the Alliance,” he said evenly.
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