Episode 414: Insomnia, Part Two
And so it goes. The pilgrims’ containers are brought over and fitted into place. The pilgrims themselves walk on. They’re all dressed in utilitarian, simple, natural fabrics. Durable and maybe not the most comfortable but easy to care for and repair in a survival setting. And despite Nika’s fears, every single one of them is of adult age. Young, in their early twenties, but adult. They cover a variety of racial stock and carry themselves with a bad-ass professionalism normally found in war veterans and scientific specialists, though they are clearly too young to be the former and the latter doesn’t quite fit their description.
Nevertheless, Joshua takes pains to greet each one as they board our ship, getting their names so he knows who they are. Each carries a military-issue duffel bag—the sum of their worldly possessions—and Joshua has a standing order from Nika to search them for weapons. She doesn’t dictate as to his method, she just expects it to be done. It’s not easy, but Joshua gets it done as quickly and as politely as possible. No need to add insult to intrusion. They all seem to have packed the same things, minus some mild variations in toiletries and clothing, and it strongly suggests they all stocked up from the same supplier at the same time. Aside from personal razors, no weapons turn up in the search.
Dean holds himself somewhat aloof from the whole business and in the interest of fairness and completeness—to say nothing of following his Captain’s orders, Joshua draws Marcus Dean aside to confer with him on it.
Joshua: I’ll be happy to do the search in a location elsewhere than right out here in the middle, but your stuff’s going to be searched, too. I don’t want to search through personal papers or anything like that. I just want to make sure that there’s nothing that—
Dean opens his duffel for Joshua to look through. Joshua goes through it and though he doesn’t see any weapons, he does notice a case. It’s like a backgammon board or a small briefcase. Joshua points it out to Dean.
Joshua: Anything dangerous in there?
Dean: Not to you.
Joshua: Anything?
Dean: There is some … medication in there.
Joshua: If you’ll give me your word that whatever’s in that case won’t be used against me and mine, I’m happy to leave it as is.
Dean: I don’t see how I could. It’s part of our preparations for what we might encounter on Miranda.
Joshua: And you’ll give me your word.
Dean: Yes.
Joshua: Then we’re done.
Some look excited and giddy at this adventure, others more steely and on top of things. But there’s an undercurrent of bravado, of putting on a show, maintaining a good face on it. Joshua is watching them carefully: he knows they’ve been studying our ship, following our ship, and he’s looking to see if there’s not already some weird relationship with the crew already in place. Like: Oh wow! You’re Nika!—that sort of thing. Maybe Rina’s paranoia is rubbing off on him. Well no. Nothing like that but he does notice a look of admiration of our ship on their faces, the sort that is uncommon amongst passengers when aboard a cargo hack. As Rina tells Joshua when he mentions their reverence for our girl:
Rina: As long as they don’t hump her or lick her, I’m fine with it.
And that’s about all the time she has for the matter. Because, just as Joshua’s busy processing the boarding of 25 extra people, she’s ridiculously busy supercharging the ship’s systems. Like with oxygen, so the ship can keep all 25 passengers plus the crew breathing. And those systems are going to be strained. Atmo, waste and water reclamation, climate control—all are going to be pushed to their limits. We discuss it before we leave.
Joshua: If there’s anything that you need that would improve the situation that you can buy, now’s the time to speak up. Cuz ... well, cuz now’s the time to speak up.
Arden: Is there anything we need to get anything to recharge our environmental systems.
Rina: I’m sure we do.
Nika: We’re gonna have to have a lay-over too, so if you find something along the way—
Joshua: There will be. I know her.
Nika takes the time to meet the passengers individually as well. As Captain, she wants to know who she’s taking aboard and as a well brought-up woman, it’s simply common decency to meet them.
And the provisioning continues. The goods are piling up—we’ve got stacks of crates and boxes in every corner, pallets taking up real estate on the deck. We pack our ship to the gills, leaving narrow paths through the goods between compartments. We briefly entertain the idea of perhaps ditching a couple of our dedicated containers for empty ones to store it all … but only briefly. As Nika rightly points out, we’re cut to the bone on containers as it is. We can’t get rid of our weapons or Kiera’s unit: we’ve only the one cannon and Kiera’s unit is our back-up medical facility. After all, we might have to shoot our way free of Miranda or need Kiera’s medical skills afterward.
Nika: The possibility exists. That’s why we’re not really [ditching those containers].
Joshua: All right. That’s your decision, Captain. I’m okay with it.
Kiera: (claps Rina’s shoulder) Okay. I say itty bitty squishy kitty—cuz you’re the one who can dial the ship up and get us off. I got pilot. I might not pretty but we’ll get away.
Arden: Like the last time we were at Miranda.
Joshua: What about the last time you were at Miranda?
Arden: We spent six months there we didn’t want.
Rina: Four.
Arden: Then four. Whatever. It seemed like six.
Joshua: Okay. I’ll do my best and try to make sure that you don’t stay—
Arden: I don’t really think it’s in your hands.
Joshua: That’s probably true. But I can promise to do my best.
Nika: That’s a pie crust promise.
Joshua: I don’t think I’ve heard that one before but I’ll take that as it comes.
Nika: Easily made, easily broken.
Joshua: I like that.
Arden: … Okay ...
Kiera: Live the adventure, Arden. Live the adventure.
Arden: I have been and that’s my problem.
Kiera: Live it more. See, I’ve been stretchin’ my surgery skills. Think of it as a new opportunity.
Well, there is that. Reminded of his medical duty, Arden searches Marcus Dean out and inquires if he has any special medical concerns or if his people have any special medical needs.
Arden: Anything I can do to help you to get ready to settle on the planet?
Dean: Dr. Arden. I’ve heard of your efforts in Prion disease and others and I’m hoping that you will be … open to what we’re doing here. We’re not going in blind to the circumstances on Miranda.
Dean opens the slim briefcase Joshua had uncovered in the bag search, opens it and turns it so Arden can see what’s inside. Snugged in the case are numerous vials of pills.
Dean: This drug—
And here he pulls out a vial and names a chemical Arden is unfamiliar with.
Dean: It’s a cocktail that people believe may produce an immunity to Pax.
Arden: Really. Hm.
Dean: We’ve been taking it for a while.
Arden: Okay…
Dean: So far we’ve noticed no adverse effects.
Arden: Do you have one or two pills I can use to analyze myself?
Dean: You could. I’m not sure if you’d be able to get… (pause)
Arden: Anything out of it? I’d thought it’d be worth a shot.
Dean: Yes we should have enough spares so that you can have two pills.
Dean hands them over and Arden takes them with his thanks.
Dean: But as you can see, we’re not showing any adverse effects.
Arden: No, but I would like to be aware of any sort of medical emergencies that might occur.
Dean: We haven’t noticed any significant things but while you’re here you might want to look it up on the Cortex.
Arden: Do you have the medical records on your people?
Dean: No. I don’t have them.
Arden is looking for any ailments that might affect us during our journey.
Arden: Like high blood pressure…
Dean: We’ve all been checked out for that. No one has any of those conditions. No neurological conditions. No genetic diseases. This is about as wholesome a stock as—
Arden: Whereabouts in the Verse are you from?
Dean: From many different places.
Arden: Any from the Core?
Dean: Some are from the Core, yes.
Arden: Any from Sophie?
Dean: Sophie? … Oh, yes. Your home planet. There are very few that have journeyed from that place.
Arden: That is one telling of the story, yes.
Dean: Is there something else?
Arden: The people of Sophie did what I consider unethical genetic tampering. That I am not… they tried to make people for specific purposes.
Dean: All people are made for specific purposes.
Arden: Yeah, but not by human hands.
Dean: You’re right. By God’s, then. But that is one of the reasons that we are leaving the Core. And the Rim.
Arden: One could say that Miranda is still part of the Rim.
Dean: I suppose you might. But it is somewhat isolated.
Arden: Considering what happened there, it’s going to be a part of this history for quite a number of years.
Dean: Yes. At least, during our lifetime.
True. Well then. Arden consults his notes, makes a few marks, and asks.
Arden: Have you all been tested for Prion disease?
Dean: Yes.
Arden: You know Reavers carry Prion disease.
Dean: I thought you dispelled that belief.
Arden: Let me rephrase—the chance of getting Prion disease from a Reaver is greater than getting it from anybody else.
Dean: Well that’s true. They’re more likely to consume brains than anyone else.
Arden: Yes.
Although it’s not outside the realm of possibility to get it from someone else. Joshua suffered a bite from a stitch and Arden assiduously tested for Prions in that case too. Luckily Joshua’s Prion screen results came up clean.
Dean: We are… I will say that Prion disease is not on the top of my list of concerns. I’d say, in chronological order: Pirates, Reavers, the Pax …
Arden: Do you have any reason to think that pirates are after you?
Dean: I understand the space around Blue Sun is filled with them.
Arden: Is it? Okay.
Dean: How many have you encountered?
Arden: More than I want.
No joke. And in terms of what’s flying the unfriendly skies, we have the PDF Navy—which admittedly isn’t much of a navy in terms of numbers—and we have some pirates. Or perhaps we should call them Privateers, financed by the Alliance to harass the population or at least are given harbor in which to sell their booty. And you have Reavers. Plus people who are out there for other reasons. And that’s before you break out any number of Rina’s conspiracy theories. (Best not go into those…)
His exam and interview concluded, Arden thanks Marcus Dean for his time. And in the grander scheme, the last details of loading conclude in short order and we take off for Meridian, 17 days away.
Wednesday, 27 Aug 2521
Day 3
As Rina suspected, having 25 extra souls breathing inside our girl puts a big damn strain on our life support systems. First the atmo aboard our girl gets hot, then it gets too cold, then it’s humid … and then it’s stinky … and so on. Our climate control is really straining, tipping dangerously into the red on the dials, and Rina is hard pressed to keep it running, constantly monitoring and tweaking and sometimes beating things back to normal. On several occasions she’s brought up short with the realization she can’t hear it running and finds that the atmo’s failed utterly. Tissue-thin streamers make their appearance over the vents after that, a low-tech visual check that the air is still on. Our lights flicker periodically as Rina patches reroutes through the rest of the ship’s systems take on some of the strain. As the trip wears on, the atmo is tainted with various odors running the gamut from damp mildew to hot dust to last night’s dinner—all signs that the scrubbers need a break. It’s tainted for other reasons, too, and the atmo in engineering takes on the distinct flavor of blue. Russian, mostly, with some Chinese thrown in.
And then there’s the plumbing. The passengers are pretty good at cleaning and picking up after themselves but the head is a constantly recurring issue. Rina’s knowledge of our girl’s plumbing comes in handy and she’s resigned to keeping the plunger with her wherever she happens to be.
Joshua is likewise run ragged cooking for and feeding 30 people. Harvesting judiciously from Botany Bay, digging out the canned food and protein paste from our supplies and shifting them around as empty space gets made as the food gets eaten … prepping, cooking, cleaning … he’s spending nearly all his time in the galley. When he’s not in the galley, he’s doing laundry and tackling the myriad tasks a steward is normally responsible for on a ship. And he’s doing it with his arm in a sling. Rina pitches in as best she’s able, as do the others, but no one is blessed with a ton of spare time this trip out. Or getting their usual amount of sleep.
Except maybe Kiera. Being neither pilgrim nor crew, she’s not obligated to keep the ship maintained or to prepare for a life on Miranda. Kiera is sticking to her promise not to sleep with any of the passengers but that doesn’t preclude her letting them know that she has lovely shampoos and soaps she can sell them at minimal cost. Otherwise she vents her displeasure over the substandard air conditioning by popping every so often onto the bridge and giving a squeaky ‘eihh!’ at Nika. The tenth time she does it Nika swivels her chair around, thoroughly pissed.
Nika: If you ‘eihh!’ at me one more time, woman, I’m gonna shut off the air conditioning to your container and you will be stuck on here with the rest of us.
Kiera flounces back to her container to find something else with which to amuse herself.
As for the pilgrims themselves, there are more of them than that time we transported those accountants and thankfully they are much easier to care for. For one, they are not drunk and ornery but quiet and very polite. And they willingly lend us a hand where we can fit them. Space is tight in the galley even at the best of times and with all the supplies we’ve crammed into our girl, space is tight everywhere. But they do what they can to help in the spaces they’re authorized to go. Joshua enlists anybody he’s able to snag, passenger and crew alike, for tasks X,Y, and Z.
Dean and his people would like to meet together on occasion as a group but thanks to the supplies taking up all the free space aboard, there isn’t really any place uncluttered enough to accommodate all of them. When they manage it, it is in the forward lounge and it seems primarily to gather to pray and to hear the readings of the last chapter of the Christian Bible—the Revelations—and using it to identify various examples of corruption in the Core and the Rim that they are fleeing. And this sort of meeting isn’t restricted to Sunday worship. It’s every day. So the forward lounge is choked with people as well as supplies and those folks who couldn’t fit in the lounge, listen from the foredeck corridors and the entrances to their containers. Joshua tries to find time to sit in on one of these meetings and the rest of the crew listen in passing as they go about their duties.
In one of his rare spare moments, Joshua asks Dean what he and his people are doing to prepare themselves. Because Joshua’s curious about the whole undertaking. They’ve obviously done a lot to prepare, like with meds and stuff, but he’d like to know what else they’ve been doing. Are they unarmed masters? Are they gun trained? Nika wants to know what their plan is against the Reavers. They’ve had considerable martial arts training, as it turns out. They’ve been practicing various techniques and we find out that Marcus Dean had been a Marine in the War. He’d been training them in specialized techniques, concentrating on the hard core moves. Disarming the opponent? No—not when the opponent is a Reaver. The techniques Dean is teaching his people are those geared toward killing people who kill and aren’t afraid of being hurt; moves that will hurt, maim or kill.
They actually practice a tiny bit of their martial arts as best they can in their dorm rooms. They also pray in their rooms. They’ve also been practicing agricultural techniques for the past few years: soil analysis, water analysis, and such like. Health awareness is rigorously attended to by drilling for symptoms of Pax-related responses. If they see people going drowsy, they have a response for it: gather up the affected person and take care of them until they recover. Of course, there isn’t room really to do this sort of drill aboard our cramped ship, but they willingly explain their drills to us when we ask.
Rina’s interested in that information, thinking it would be good to know when we kiss dirt on Miranda. She and Joshua ask them about other things too: where they’ve been practicing, where they’ve been staging, that sort of thing. The answer to those questions: wherever they’ve been living. These drills, this information—it’s not just an education, but a way of life. They’ve been living in various compounds throughout the Verse and Rina gets the impression that they’ve done so at times under the watchful eyes of the authorities and have been pushed out of many places they’ve been. They are kind of like a survivalist cult and by many lights, that makes them a little too weird to tolerate as neighbors. For instance, they weren’t all that interested in trading with others. Their discipline kept them aloof. They’d also heard of other survivalist groups like themselves and encountered them. Some of the encounters did not go well and the other groups suffered injuries and casualties.
They may call themselves the Lambs of Megiddo, but helpless these people are not.
Joshua has one more question to ask Marcus Dean and he’s careful to ask it when Rina is not around: They are clearly informed about everything happening on and regarding Miranda. The depth of their knowledge convincingly argues that they’d sent someone there, someone who was able to get the intel for them and bring it back. Mike Carter is a survivor and a fighter much like them, and Mike is there. Do they know of him? Do they care? Do they know if Mike planned to strike out on his own? Were they planning to contact him? Were they going to meet and strike out together?
Dean: There is a cloud in my vision about this. I don’t know… I always imagined us alone in our dreams of this journey. That said, Miranda is an M-class planet with hundreds of thousands of miles of land. It’s quite possible we could land and never encounter another person our entire lives.
Joshua: Yes.
Dean: However, there may be others who have had similar visions who are drawn there. And perhaps Michael … Carter is one of them. There may be others as well. I imagine there may also be people who are there—sent there or who go there—with less honorable intentions.
Joshua: I don’t doubt that in the least.
Dean: And that is something we will have to deal with as well. But as I say, it is somewhat cloudy as to what our reception will be there. We don’t imagine there’ll be many people there but we haven’t decided fully how we will receive those who come to us, if their fate is. We aren’t going to seek out anyone.
Joshua: You’ve been having these visions your entire life?
Dean: What’s that?
Joshua: The visions. You’ve had visions your entire life? Always been a man of God?
Dean: Well… I was always of God but not as I am now. When I was a soldier, it was different. It was different times. But I saw enough to see. And I think I was in a bad place when I was … ah … enlightened.
Joshua: Yes. In my limited anecdotal experience, seriously devoted men of God—three of three—have been former Alliance-related military.
Dean: I’m the only one with military experience. I do my best to train them.
Joshua: That wasn’t meant to be an insult or a slight. It’s just interesting.
Dean: I cannot understand a person who’s been in a war and not found God. But I’ve heard tell some lose Him.
Rina: (passing through) There are no atheists in a foxhole.
Joshua: (to Dean) Thank you.
Joshua goes back to work and we travel on.
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