Episode 218: Captive Audience, Part 2

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Captive Audience, part 1

Day Three: On our suggestion, Joshua’s focusing on imitating the voices of the pirate crew. He’s starting to feel the effects of withdrawal from his meds and it helps take his mind off things. He comes up with a voice we haven’t heard before.

Joshua: “Just leave this to Jack. I’m gonna to take care of this. I’m gonna make it all go away, but I gotta have your trust. We can make this go away. We can make this work for us.”

Leave what? Make what go away? What’s going to work for whom? And who’s Jack?

Nika hears this through Joshua’s open door and sticks her head in to check on him. Joshua’s huddled up tight and rocking back and forth.

Nika: Joshua, can you do that one again?
Joshua: What one? The one about the Senator’s aide…the one about ‘fifteen and two for the Senator, too’?
Nika: No, the one about Jack.
Joshua: Which one about Jack,…um….Did I say something about…Jack? I don’t remember that particular punchline.
Nika: You said something that caught my interest and I was wondering if you could do it again.
Joshua: (cringing, waving hands, shaking head) No..no,no,no..nope. No. Don’t remember it. Sorry.
Nika: It’s okay. Stay calm.
Joshua: No I’m calm…. I’m calm…. I’m very calm. Very calm.

Not really, but managing.

Joshua: I’m going to sleep now, for a little bit. My head hurts.
Nika: Okay.

She leaves him to it and tells the rest of us about it. This is beyond weird and it prompts Nika to ask Tom when he brings us our meal if he could talk to Mary. We need to get Arden to see Joshua. Tom says the ship is still pulling to the right, but it’s okay, he can rewire it. Nika persists in her petition, saying Joshua is looking rocky and needs his meds. He’s getting really ill.

Tom: Yeah. I know what that’s like. But I’m all better now that I’m off my medication. You should go off. Then you can see the real world.
Joshua: I see the real world. The real world is: I see through everything.
Tom: You can see through me, too?
Joshua: Yeah.
Tom: (eager) What do you see?
Joshua: Shells.
Tom: (puzzled but excited) Shells?
Joshua: Shells of people. And nothing.
Tom: What kind of shells?
Joshua: I’m going back to my room now.
Tom: That guy might be the smartest man on this spaceship.
Nika: He might be.
Tom: OR….a craaaaazy fool.
Nika: (tell me about it) Yeah.
Tom: Crazier than….YOU folks….(laughs) I’ll talk to her. Enjoy your cruise.
Nika: Thank you. I appreciate it, Tom.

Rina pipes up when the door closes.

Rina: Did I hear him correctly? Did I hear him say he’s rewiring shit?
Nika: The ship does in fact pull to the right. He’s fuckin’ insane but he actually knows what he’s talking about when it comes to piloting. We’re gonna leave that alone.

Tom says he’ll see what he can do. some time later, Mary comes to our door.

Nika: I am really really sorry to bother you but Joshua is not doing well. He really needs to see Arden or he needs his medication right now.
Mary: What kind of drugs are these? They’re not like…Our medic said they were like, recreational drugs?
Nika: No. They’re not.
Mary: Well, you know. People… get addicted.

She’s just not hearing us. She says she can get Joshua a sedative that could make him feel better. Would that be all right? We agree—anything is better than nothing because Joshua is not doing well, but we’d really rather have an actual doctor take a look at him.

Mary demurs, saying Arden’s been a confusing case. Going back and forth between being strangely cooperative to uncooperative. They had to fight him to take his gun away. The rest of the crew does’t trust him, to be quite honest, and she doesn’t really either.

Joshua: Trust is a valuable commodity.
Rick: Do you trust any of us?
Mary: Well….I mean, you look like you’re suffering so I’ll see if I can give you something.
Joshua: Thank you.

She leaves. The next person to walk through the door isn’t Arden but Cooper, and he has a bag of marijuana and another filled with Rick’s mushrooms. No meds.

Cooper: (to Rina) Hey, Bombmaker.

He tosses Rina a lighter. She catches it.

Cooper: Maybe you can make something explode with that. Have at it. It’s your ship.

He leaves. She scowls, but keeps the lighter. It could come in handy. If only to light Joshua’s joints. There are rolling papers included with the MJ and Rick shows Joshua how to roll a joint and toke. It’s not Joshua’s meds but it should help him sleep. Joshua’s never smoked one before and the rest of us hold our breath as best we can, to avoid getting a contact high. Joshua shuts himself in his room to keep the smoke contained.

Under the influence of the MJ, Joshua sees of a luxury liner’s cargo hold. There are a couple of fancy cars in the hold amongst the more regular cargo boxes, there are steamer trunks, that sort of thing. A voice seems to come from behind him, saying:

Voice: I believe our mission has changed. From rescue to salvage.

Night Three: Joshua dreams of the liner again. He sees familiar faces, and he knows their names: Mary. Sandra. Leslie. Marx. The Fei siblings. And Jack. No one’s wearing the grey jumpsuits. Up against the corner is another guy. He’s a dark haired fellow, older, in his late forties. He doesn’t look so good.

Jack is looking at them all.

Jack: All right. The people on the —

His mouth moves, but the word that comes out doesn’t match the movement.

Jack: — 'Kingston', the people on the Kingston can ID us. So…. anyone dissent?

Everyone looks at Mary. She looks across the room to the dark haired man.

Mary: (very quietly) Do what you have to do.

Watching this through his dream haze, Joshua whimpers.

Joshua: Ohhh….not good….I don’t like these dreams anymore….

Day Four:

Over our morning meal, Joshua admits he thinks he’s mentally accessing the pirate crew through his dreams. He tells us of his latest one.

Joshua: It felt real but it wasn’t, thankfully. They were all there, in this big ship, there was a guy in the corner….And they said something about people on the Kingston….it was weird, totally weird, like he was saying something but “Kingston” popped out. It’s like the brain is accessing that part of the brain where the brain has got the Kingston stored. But they shot him. They said the people on the Kingston could ID us and they looked at her and then they looked at the guy and then they shot him. Or…well, I mean I think they shot him. I didn’t see it, but I mean it sounded like it was what they were gonna do.
Nika: I don’t suppose you can draw, do you? Like, draw faces?
Joshua: Yeah, I can draw….draw decently.

Rina sacrifices a tightly rolled card from her deck to her lighter, charring it to make an improvised pencil. Nika asks him to draw the people from the dream she’d overhead him dreaming the day before, the one where someone is saying they could make it all go away. It's not the best set of tools or situation, but Joshua clearly has some talent and manages to sketch his portraits on the deck in one of the rooms, out of sight of our captors. They're done well enough that we can ascertain that Jack is no one we’ve seen before.

Joshua looks at his work and asks Rick to give him the mushrooms, hoping they prevent the dreams, maybe, because they are really distressing. Besides, he could die at any minute—it’s Day Four. Nika declares she’s not happy with that state of affairs, she doesn’t want him to die. Joshua quickly adds he doesn’t feel like he’s going to die, but…well…he’s hurting and it’s all very weird.

Nika: Okay, who told you you were going to die?
Joshua: They did. The….the…people in charge. Like the…
Nika: Like the crazy school people?
Joshua: I wouldn’t say they were crazy but…yeah. I mean, they were creepy, now that I look back at it…
Nika: Now there’s one good way of keeping someone addicted to a substance they want you on.
Joshua: I guess.

What better way to control someone but gaslight them into believing an addictive drug means life or death? Which may not be true, but the withdrawal symptoms would be mighty unpleasant and a convincing argument for the lie. After all, the pirates’ medic looked Joshua’s meds over and declared them recreational. Absent his meds, Joshua apologizing for bogarting the mushrooms from Rick. Rick waves it off. No worries, man.

Mary brings us our lunch later that day and she looks at Joshua, who’s by now acting kinda strange thanks to his symptoms. Are those the drugs? she asks. Drugs? What drugs? Joshua asks back. He’s not on his drugs because they won’t let him have the—oh, you mean the other drugs? Not that he’s under the influence of any right now…because the MJ was…and he hasn’t eaten any mushrooms yet today and…..

Yeah. Not quite right.

Rick sidles up to Mary and asks if our situation has changed. She says no, she thinks everyone’s okay with the current status quo. We’re just all gonna play nice and nobody has to get hurt. It should work out well. Rick asks if it’s working a little bit better for her since she’s Captain, now? Yeah, she says. Everything’s all right. Well, they don’t know who they’re dealing with (that would be us) and they’re all a little tense (that would be them) but since we (us) aren’t doing anything crazy, they (them) wont’ do anything crazy. Everything will work out fine.

Seeing Mary looks inclined to linger and talk, Nika asks her what happened aboard the Kingston. Upon hearing the word, Joshua tries to get a reading off Mary, get a look at her first thought before she hides it. He hopes he can get verification that his dreams are real…or not, considering how upsetting they are to him.

Mary pauses for a second and her voice is very soft when she speaks.

Mary: That’s…where my father died. I don’t like to talk about it.

Joshua gets the feeling she’s telling us the truth. He gets an image on the heels of that confession. It’s an image, several images of the unidentified man that he saw in his vision, the man in the corner with Jack and Mary and the crew looking on. The vision where she delivers the verdict: do what you have to do.

Joshua: Wow.
Mary: I don’t want to talk about it.
Joshua: You really don’t have that Captain-control thing going, do you?

Mary leaves. Joshua turns to Rick.

Joshua: I need the shrooms now. I’d rather not think about it. (to the rest of us) Oh, and…I’m reasonably certain they killed him.
Rina: They killed their own Captain.
Joshua: Yeah, she agreed to kill her own father.
Nika: What?!
Joshua: She agreed to it. Like, they asked her and ..in that dream, when they all…the people from the Kingston could ID us, and they all looked at….like, does anyone disagree? And they all looked at her, like … the only reason they’d all look at her is if it was something significant. Like she wasn’t the Captain but Jack was standing there. He was standing right there—
Nika: But Jack wasn’t her father.
Joshua: No, but Jack was standing there right next to her. The guy on the floor, like, they all so….. (sketches the scene on the deck)… And they all look around at her and she says ‘No, do what must be done’ and the dream faded away before the guy got the gun to the head.
Nika: So…her dad’s on the floor?
Joshua: Uh-huh.
Nika: Mostly dead?
Joshua: Mostly dead and….and involved with the Kingston and can identify them for whatever they did, whatever that was, and they had to….eliminate him.

Joshua mimes a throat slitting, drawing a finger across his throat and lolling his tongue out. And exits for his bunk to shroom himself up.

Forty minutes later we have our hands full holding down a weeping, sobbing and at times raging Joshua in the throes of a fairly bad mushroom trip. We take it in turns and somehow get through it.

He’s talking, crying, screaming about blood, so much blood, dear God it’s everywhere….they’re people, dammit!... Raving. Just freakin’ raving in a wide variety of voices along with his own.

The last thing we hear is Joshua saying:

Joshua: (softly) Daddy…daddy….

And he finally passes out. Blessed quiet. We all ease back and breathe.

Nika: (to Rick) No more mushrooms.
Rick: Til the morning.
Nika: Why would you subject him to that again?
Rick: How else are we going to get to hear what else he’s read from them, based on that?
Nika: I don’t know if that’s good for him.
Rick: If what we learn from it can save us from this juncture—
Nika: How is anything we learn from the Kingston going to save us?
Rina: Psychological leverage.
Rick: Anything we can learn about their group dynamic.

Group dynamic? We know they have an insane pilot and there’s seriously something wrong with that man. No, there’s got to be a better way to learn more about the pirates.

Night Four: Cooper makes a surprise appearance during the night and during Rina’s watch. He’s got a bottle of booze and a leer in his eye and he hinks Rina right the hell out.

Yob tvoyu mat!

She keeps at least half the length of the container between them and he seems inclined not to chase her but stay at the door, leaning, leering and drinking.

Cooper: (slurring) Hey, there.
Rina: (whispers to self) Just my luck.
Cooper: Y’know wha’ I like abou’ you, Renal? Y’know wha’ I like abou’ you?

Rina glares but says nothing.

Cooper: Y’ don’ take crap. I like dat. It’s good stuff. (holds out bottle) Y’wan’ sumpin’ t’drink?
Rina: (brusque) No thanks.

She shifts her stance to something more like a fighter’s, keeping her arms loose and her fists not quite up, but ready. And keeps her eye on him.

Cooper: Yeh, it’s prolly jus’ as well….more for me….(gulps down more) So, um…you ever, ah…kill a man? You like like a person who’s killed a man.
Rina: (a beat) Have you?
Cooper: (nothin’ doin’!) Yep.
Rina: (ditto) Fair enough.
Cooper: Whaddya think abou’ that?

Rina says nothing.

Cooper: I mean, it’s a pretty serious thing. T’killa man. Kill somebody…it’s not jus’ like fightin’ somebody…or even jus’ shootin’ at somebody…you c’n shoot at lotsa people—you might even kill somebody—but it’s not like killin’ a man.

Rina still says nothing. Not a lick of trust there, nope. He’s six-four or five. She’s five-nothing. She’s keeping her distance, running the knuckles of one fist across the cupped palm of her other hand. Nothing too threatening, but staying prepared nonetheless.

Cooper: Yeh, I know. Yer th’ quiet type. Well….(shrugs)…I think it changes you. When you really do it. Y’know….it’s…it’s not all that bad. Maybe it makes you more…y’know, ah, what’s that word that Boo-dists use…?...uhhh…..
Rina: ‘Stupid’?
Cooper: Yeah, yeah…Nah….

Rina’s drawn even with Nika’s door and she gives it a discreet double-tap. That wakes the blonde up and she pokes her head out, sees Cooper and wakes all the way up. Cooper hails her to join their party, he shares the booze and asks her the same question: has she killed anyone? Nika admits she has, in defense of herself and her crew.

It gets a bit philosophical after that, with Cooper saying killing changes a person. You just can’t kill a person and be the same afterward. He rambles on and we let him, hoping to avoid any unpleasantness and when Cooper is ordered to go by one of the Feis, Rina asks Cooper to leave the bottle behind. He does, saying he doesn’t figure she could make a Molotov cocktail out of it and she squirrels it away. It could be useful as a weapon, if only as a broken-bottle knife.

Cooper is there and some of the pirate crew and they seem to be discussing something.

Day Five: Joshua isn’t feeling very good, obviously.

He has a vision of a Captain Vane being shot by people wearing grey Unified Reclamation jumpsuits. Are these the pirates, disguised as UR crew, taking over another ship? It would explain how the Lenore is a salvage class vessel. The previous dream of huddled UR crew being shot by Cooper starts to make sense. Did the pirates steal a UR vessel and under its guise attack the luxury liner? Is Captain Vane the captain of the luxury liner or of another ship?

Joshua cannot be sure.

He has another vision to go with the first. Everything’s blurry. The POV is near the floor looking up and Joshua gets the sense that Vane is injured and dying. Just before the pirate crew shoot him, his last thought is “Protect Mary…”

Bang.

Day Seven: Joshua’s getting really rocky now. He’s seven days off his meds and things just aren’t right with him anymore. He mumbles and talks to himself, gestures to things that aren’t there. Under his mattress we find a ton of scratches, graffiti-like, a mishmash of the United Reclamation logo, words like ‘blood’ and ‘blood bond’ and “Vane”, “Wyrm’s Tongue”, “Remember”, and “Kingston” and “distress call”, “MURDER” and “MASS MURDER” being prominent. How the scratched writing/drawings came to be under his mattress he cannot say. His fingers are bruised, but there’s nothing to explain how he could have scratched the words into the metal platform holding the mattress off the floor.

Mary and Fei Wu Ling show up that evening with Joshua’s meds and administer a small dose. After being off his meds for so long, Joshua isn’t sure he can believe that relief is coming. It’s a little easier to believe when they leave a small supply with Joshua and shut us in again.

As they leave, they take Rina out to fix the parallax array. It seems to be coming under some kind of interference and the pirate crew decides that Rina’s the best qualified to fix it. Annie Bonnie accompanies her in the avionics crawlspace and points out the neutrino detector we’d installed on Miranda. She asks what it is and Rina makes like she’s never seen it before. Luckily she manages not to give the game away by protesting too much and fixes the array under Annie’s watchful eye. Rina manages to slip a small Phillips head screwdriver into her boot nonetheless. She gets escorted back to the container.

And the days pass and run into each other.

Rick continues to chat up Mary whenever he’s let out to take care of his fish. His charm is working on her and she unbends enough to reminisce about another ship she’s been on, the Buttercup. Rick draws her out on it and she says Buttercup came before Lenore and that they’d acquired Lenore around December 2518. And as for where we found Lenore, she says the Navy Ship just showed up out of nowhere, it didn’t show up on the sensors.

And given how beefed up their sensors are, that is a bit odd.

Could they have been betrayed to the Navy by one of their crew, Rick asks. Mary refuses to believe it. No. Never. Rick shines Mary on and they get cozy. Very cozy.

Yay for Rick. Not so yay for the rest of us. But we’re still alive. And we’re heartened by the intel Rick brings us when he comes back. Buttercup, then Lenore. Things are beginning to come into focus.

Joshua has another dream/vision. In it Cooper is dragging a UR employee across the floor like a sack of potatoes while Vane and Jack are discussing changing the registry of the Buttercup.

Does this mean the Lenore is the Buttercup? Or were they two different ships? There’s no telling. It’s not like we can ask our captors to clarify the details for us. At least Joshua has his meds and knows that the envelope of off-med time has been pushed a little farther.

Friday, 16 Aug 2520

Eleven days after our capture we feel the ship drop out of pulse. Rina feels it immediately as does Nika and Nika mutters it’s too early for us to be at Aesir. We must have come out of pulse farther out…and Rina starts thinking the worst. Thanks to Tom’s piloting and rewiring of things, he’s managed to shave a day off our travel time and it is indeed Aesir.

Our captors allow us out of the container and we’re given time to pack up our belongings before they strand us on the dirt. Some fast talking convinces them to leave us the Gator, the better to transport Jake’s body to his folks and no sooner have the pirates left us in the dust than we get on the horn to Jake’s family. They agree to send someone out in a small craft to meet us. We drive the Gator aboard and are flown to Malmo, there to do one last favor for our fallen friend, and bring him home.

In the balance of the day that follows, we get our bearings, see Jake properly off down the fjord in a Viking funeral….and explain to Mother Aberg what happened to her son. And we beg a favor of her—can we borrow a shuttle of hers to chase down the Gift? We know she has cargo she must deliver and we are pretty sure the pirates will want to honor that contract. We know where the cargo is supposed to go. Our ship must not be too far from it. We have a chance to steal her back, but only if we leave now.

We get that shuttle and rifles for good measure.

The Gift had to fly to the southern continent to deliver that cargo and there are some storms ravaging the landscape there, requiring a lengthy detour. It slows us down, but it’s also slowed down the Gift, letting us make up for lost time. We find her still on the dirt at the cargo’s destination, a small village and we land our shuttle some distance away. We lock her up and continue on foot.

The Gift looks empty in the evening light, with only one person in evidence. It’s Tom and he’s apparently changing the lock on the airlock access. Looks like the pirates are making the ship theirs. There seems to be only one person guarding the ship and we are armed…what if we stormed the ship and took her back?

Joshua comes up with a different idea. Standing in the shadow of the tree line, he mimicks Jack’s voice and calls out to Tom on the airlock ladder: Leaving me? Like the Kingston all over again?

It’s a risk, based on nothing more than the fact that of all the people Joshua saw killed in his visions, Jack was never one of them. If Jack is known to be dead, however…..

We wait.

Tom turns at Joshua’s call and buys it. They parlay—Tom too paranoid to allow ‘Jack’ to come close, and Joshua all to happy to keep his face hidden—and come to an agreement: Jack will share what he knows if Mary’s crew will agree to rendezvous with him at a neutral location. Say…forty minutes? Tom agrees.

We pull back and plan to take the ship when the crew vacates the Gift, to arrive at a rendezvous that doesn’t have us in it. We have half an hour to see if our plan will actually work and as the night settles deeper around us, we lock and load.

Jump to:
Captive Audience, part 1


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