Navigating the Catch-22s
Val sat at the edge of the captain's chair, leaning forward towards the ship controls, a mess of dials, panels, and buttons, only some of which actually seemed to be working. Rachel was elsewhere, presumably in her cabin, and Val was taking the opportunity to familiarize himself with the bridge. The funny part, he thought, is that it feels like I already know it. He ran a finger down across the glass of a panel that was currently dark, but he knew that was a long range sensor panel. It would only light up when a ship was approaching them from a distance. A memory flashed across through his head - his father standing behind the chair as a young Val sat in it, dwarfed by the size of it compared to his five year old frame. Val remembered looking up in near awe as his father pointed to that long range sensor panel and said something, but the words seemed lost to him now. It was as if what his father was saying to him wasn't as important as his mere presence.
Shaking his head, Val stood up from the chair and surveyed the bridge as a whole. Delilah, for all he made fun of her (deservedly so), had some redeeming traits. Under Rachel's talent, the ship had been able to outrun an Alliance police ship. Val wasn't sure exactly how fast or well made a typical police cruiser was, but he suspected that it was in the upper tiers of ship quality. It was certainly more modern than Delilah, but his father's favored possession had left their pursuers in the dust. He was beginning to understand why his father had been attached to the ship, even if he didn't really understand why his father had thought Val would be the same way. But understanding wasn't forgiveness. If forgiveness was a ship, he thought, it was far enough out that Val's long range sensor would still be dark.
Thinking about the Alliance pursuit reminded Val that he had some decisions to be made. Not just ones related to that cargo in the hold, but even bigger ones related to the life he had built for himself back on Paquin. He had been putting all the pieces together in his head and he didn't like the conclusion he was coming to. If what he thought was going to happen was going to happen, Val would accept it and move on. After all, that was all he could do. But he couldn't be sure. He needed an outside perspective. As he climbed down the hatchway stairs, he walked through his reasoning.
Rachel was too close to the ship. He liked Rachel, honestly more than he had expected to, but she couldn't be trusted to be unbiased in matters related to Delilah.
Vikki was too optimistic and wide eyed.
And Poco....well, Poco was Poco. Val wasn't completely sure how much he could trust Poco. Whatever advice Poco would give would ultimately benefit Poco, not the asker. Val wasn't sure enough of himself in this spot to trust that he could view Poco's answers through that filter.
That left Dr. Grace. Tian. And if her story about her exit interview with the Alliance was any indication, she was exactly the perspective needed. She had been in this situation before. Recently. She wouldn't mince words, but hopefully, she could help him decide whether he was going to have to uproot his life as much as he thought he would.
By the time all the thoughts had run through his head, he found himself standing outside the passenger cabin that Tian had claimed as her own. Staring over at the huge gaping hole that made up most of the fourth floor deck, Val wondered what he had gotten himself into. He sighed briefly and knocked on the door, hoping the woman inhabiting that cabin would be able to help him answer that question.
The knock on the door startled Grace Tian out of her own reverie. She had been going over in her mind, again and again, the steps she'd taken that had somehow brought her to this point. Persona non grata. It defied her very sense of SELF to be in this position, and although she had understood when the agent at her exit interview implied they wanted to scapegoat her that things might get nasty... she had NEVER dreamed it would get like this.
She set her smart screen down on the small desk in her quarters and opened the door. The sight of the Captain brought a pang of ... was that fear? But she schooled her features and stepped back, inviting him politely, "Captain. Please, come in. Would you like to sit?" She gestured to the chair she'd just vacated. There wasn't a lot of space, but there was enough that she could observe at least some of the niceties. She waited until he took a seat before perching on the bottom corner of the bunk, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. "What can I do for you, sir?"
"Start by stop calling me sir. In the here and now, I'm just Val." He smiled at the doctor to reinforce the point. "If you have a few minutes to talk, what I want to talk about....well, it involves the ship, but really its about me as Val and not me as captain. I need some advice and a perspective that's not me."
Tilting her head, Tian allowed her surprise to show through the calm face she presents to the Verse at large. "Of course, Val. Anything I can do... what's on your mind?"
Where to start? Keep it simple, he reminded himself. "You know we are headed to Paquin, which is where I'm from. I have a job there. A good job that supports me and helps me support my mother who lives there as well." He paused for a minute, thinking through the ways to ask the question before deciding to cut straight to the heart of the matter. "I'm trying to decide whether all of that is lost to me now. Have I found myself in a hole that is too large to get myself out of it?" His tone was matter-of-fact, but inside, Val could feel his insides churning a little. It would be ironic that after trying to not to be his dad for so long, that all it took from his dad was to die to make it all pointless.
Tian pulled in a slow breath, considering both what he said and what he was asking. He was only a little older than David, and the fact that she'd brought this all down on his head in her attempt to keep it away from her son ate at her insides. "I'm not sure that I have an answer for you," she admitted with a pained expression. "I don't know how good a look that ASREV got of us... and it's not like the town doesn't know the name of the ship anyway. So it's highly probable, to my mind, that an APB is going to be out on us system-wide before we hit Paquin," she finally said quietly.
"Val..." She paused a long moment and said simply, "I'm sorry. I had no idea the lengths to which they would go."
Val shook his head in negation. It wasn't her fault, not really, and he said that. "I wasn't meaning to try and lay blame, Tian. There are lots of factors in why I am where I am right now. I'm just trying to see if there are any outs that I'm not seeing. My plans when I hit Paquin change dramatically depending on whether I'm just dropping in with plans to come back or whether I need to pull up roots." He found that he had shifted unconsciously to the edge of the seat and he forced himself to sit back. Relaxing had never been Val's strong suit and all the things designed to help that he had carefully collected in his apartment over the years weren't available to him here. If Tian was right about the APB, they might not be available to him ever again.
"Let me lay out the pieces as I see them and tell me what conclusion you would come to, if you were me." He started mimicking counting on fingers to illustrate. "One, we have a cargo sought after by both the Tong and the Alliance and potentially others. Second, there is an APB out on this ship if not the people on it. Third, I can't afford to scrap the ship anywhere legitimate. Fourth, I can't sell the ship because of the hazard notice." He reached the fifth finger and was thankful he didn't need to go to his other hand. That was the sign of someone who was REALLY screwed. "Finally, my employer is not likely to have patience with me to take at least two more weeks, if not longer, to find a solution."
Val made a slightly pained smile. "My conclusion is that I'm stuck with Delilah for the foreseeable future. Anything I'm missing?"
With a rueful smile that lightened her dark eyes briefly in amusement, Tian replied, "Seems like you've got a pretty good handle on your situation. Better than I did at this stage of the game."
He nodded. He had secretly been hoping that maybe he was wrong, but he had known that he wasn't. Part of his job...his former job, he thought, was to assess situations quickly with sometimes limited data to go from. And this situation had more information than most. Just hurt that very little of it was in his favor.
"Would it be rude to ask how you handled it? How you made the adjustment?" Tian, in his eyes, was much more stable about having her former life turned upside down than most people would be. She had a pragmatic calmness to her very similar to what he tried to cultivate on a regular basis. Val had so few resources to use but he thought this no-nonsense doctor could definitely be one of them.
"Have I?" Tian asked quietly. "I rather naively assumed that by turning in my retirement papers, the situation would simply be swept under the rug. After all, I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't give the Independents information except as it pertained to patients. I certainly didn't assist their takeover of Vandenburg." She looked down at her hands, pursing her lips. "I knew that if I stayed in, they would almost definietly attempt to haul me before a court martial board. At least for an inquiry. Even if I was exonerated, my career was over."
Raising her eyes to him, she shrugged slightly. "My son David is still in the Alliance Navy, though. I had hoped that my move to get out of the military would save him some of the shadow that would follow me. That his career wouldn't be ruined." There was a wry twist to her mouth. "I don't know that I really have dealt with it. It's just now hitting me.... that to them, I'm a perfect target. People are demanding to know how Boros was taken the way it was, and the PR spin is that it had to be an inside job. And I had to be their inside man, right? I chose to stay, after all."
Blowing out a sigh, still sitting decorously straight on the edge of the bed with her hands clasped on her knees, Tian simply offered him the only advice she could. "Put one foot in front of the other, Val, and keep walking. There's nowhere to go but forward. Right or wrong, you can only make decisions based on what's in front of you. And right now, what's in front of us is the possibility that by the time we land, we may ALL be wanted. I suggest that you make use of the time we get on Paquin to at least try to put some of your affairs in order and treat it as if you're still on plan to do exactly what you intended. If we rabbit, we prove their point."
"But who are we proving that point to?" There was no correct answer. People had to be willing to listen in order to win a point and Val got the impression that none of the parties involved were likely to change their mind because he played normal on Paquin. That was why he was hesitant to dump the guns into a star - if the Delilah didn't have them when they were found, the Alliance would just assume they had been smuggled already and the Tong would assume they had been sold to someone else. Consequences weren't good either way.
"I'm thinking about asking my mother to come with me," Val said quietly. If he left her, she might self destruct or worse yet, get killed because he brought attention on her. If he brought her, getting on board Delilah might emotionally break her before one of the groups hunting their cargo killed her. For years, he had been on the other side of the table, but now it felt like he was the tourist playing a loaded game where the house always wins.
At the question, Tian nodded slightly. "And now you understand the true meaning of a Catch-22, Val. We're damned if we play it normal, we're damned if we run. So, my advice is if you're damned either way, brazen it out as best we can." She paused and then said, "It is probably not the worst idea, if you're concerned they'll use her to leverage you. People will always have agendas. I'm worried about my son, as well. On the other hand -- and not knowing your mother, I mean no disrespect -- more people on board is more chance of getting caught with our pants down later. It will be one more person whose fat has to be pulled out of the fire. And so far, we're all rubbing along as well as can be expected. What kind of effect will she have on the dynamic?" She held up a hand. "You don't have to tell me out loud, I'm merely offering you food for thought."
"It wouldn't be good," he admitted. Val tried to picture his mother on board the ship named after her, the one her husband abandoned her for and he was ashamed to admit to himself he couldn't think of a way that she would react well. She was an adult. She ought to be able to handle it, but..."I tried to keep my life simple to keep the decisions simple. All straight to hell now."
That made Tian laugh, the sound light and quite carefree as it bubbles out of her. For the first time, there is a glimpse of the woman behind the doctor; but a glimpse is all it is. "Yes, well," she told him in amusement, "the Verse does enjoy giving you a swift boot in the behind just when you think you've got it all under control. To prove that she's still in charge."
On a more serious note, though, she adds quietly, "We need to sort out what the hell we're doing with these weapons. Getting rid of them may actually be worse than keeping them aboard. I've been thinking about it since I suggested the possibility of selling them to you. I think it's what they're hoping I'll do -- take them to the people I know, since the opportunity has presented itself. Which may mean that my friends are being watched." She nibbled her lip a bit. "Again... the Catch-22."
"If I'm going to be the permanent captain of this ship," and he made an almost inaudible sigh, "I think we are going to have to figure out what we've got. When we had planned to dump them, not knowing was probably the better option. But we can't stick our head in the sand anymore, can we?"
He leaned forward and put his hand on Tian's arm, giving it a sympathetic pat. "And let me say that while I'm truly sorry you're in this situation, selfishly I'm glad you're here to help. I'm going to need all I can get if I'm going to avoid getting us all killed." Which, unfortunately, was looking like a bigger and bigger concern with every passing day.
"I'm not sure I'll be as much help as you'd like," Tian told him. "I haven't been out of the Core in more than ten years until Vandenburg. I will admit that a lot of my early training seems to be coming back, but I think in this game of keeping us alive? Rachel's going to be more help than I. She's got contacts galore. Perhaps it's time we ask her to put out some feelers for the kind of information that will help us get out of this gorram mess."
"You realize that my flight to Persephone was my first in a decade plus, right? But you're right about Rachel." Rachel could potentially open some doors out on the Rim. But Tian was wrong about how useful she would be. "Rachel can get us info, but the only person on this ship to figure out what's in those guns is you, Dr. Grace." He emphasized the title as he said it. "I'm going to have to make use of everyone on board. Assuming everyone wants to stay on board."
Although she nodded slowly, Tian's expression took on a darker cast at the directive. "I'm going to need lab facilities that are not going to be found aboard a ship. Let me wrack my brains a little about whether I could find what I need on Paquin. Or, if we wind up not being able to be there long enough or it's not there, where we might go from there to get them." She ran her hands up and down her legs once in what was, perhaps, a nervous gesture. "I'll let you know when I have something."
He nodded with an assurance that hadn't been there up until then, as if he had settled the captain role back on to himself again. "Let me know what I can do to make your job easier. I won't make any promises but it's my job to make sure you can do yours." He stood up and motioned for her to take her chair back. "I've taken up enough of your peace and quiet. Thank you for listening. It was needed." More than she would probably know, he thought.
She moved to stand and Tian moved politely to usher him to the door. "Val? For what it's worth to you, I am impressed beyond words at the way you've stepped into the role of leader for this. It isn't what anyone signed on for, and to be frank... you could have literally just walked away when it became clear that it was going to turn messy. You could have simply signed the ship over to Rachel and let her deal with the debt. But you didn't. And it speaks well of you." She held the door for him. "My ears are here anytime you need them."
"Thank you.," Val said simply, meaning it in response to both of her statements. As he turned to go, he stopped for a minute and turned back to Tian, standing in the doorway."MY responsibility. MY duty." He put a strong emphasis on every word as he said it. "The day I shirk those is the day I become my dad." The silence afterwards spoke volumes as he nodded curtly and walked away from Tian's room. Those responsibilities felt very heavy to him as he headed to his room. But then again, when had they ever been light?
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