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A Change of Vector
By CofaxCopyright 2001
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Distribution: Already submitted to Leviathan; everyone else
please let me know
The bridge was silent but for the whispers of techs at their
consoles. If Bialar Crais listened very hard, he imagined he
could hear the ticking as the Frag cannon cooled off, three
levels down and far forward. Lieutenant Teeg stood at attention
beside him, her face blank; about him the bridge crew went about
their business, as quiet and efficient as ever.
The glossy black surface of the command console reflected back
Crais's own face, dark with unspoken rage. The viewscreen and
the holographic projector both remained determinedly empty but
for the nameless planet spinning below. The Leviathan was gone,
and with it the Human.
Teeg shifted, and cleared her throat, but said nothing. As
aides went, she was acceptable. Ambitious, effective, athletic
in bed, and not too proud to serve under a recruit if it got her
what she needed.
She expected him to crack; he was, after all, only a recruit,
and they had just failed spectacularly to capture both the
escaped Leviathan and his brother's killer. Peacekeepers were
pragmatic, and felt revenge was wasted effort -- but recruits
were not known for their pragmatism, or their competence. The
lauded heroism of Sub-Officer Dacon was a long time in the past.
For a long moment, Crais allowed his gaze to rove over Teeg's
controlled blonde perfection, not saying a word. As expected,
she neither spoke nor flushed.
But that wasn't control: that was arrogance, the cold senseless
pride of those born to service.
Born to service. As he was not.
Born and raised in the creches on the largest Command Carriers,
on the stations, on the Leviathans. Born to the knowledge, born
to the comradeship. Born to their ranks, or so it had seemed to
him for much of the past thirty cycles.
Lieutenant Teeg and her kind had had it easy. She had not been
yanked from her soft bed at thirteen and thrown into the bloody
hothouse of the pre-classification testings. She hadn't been
raised to shovel manure and think of wealth in terms of
livestock and forage, rather than plasma rifles and planetary
systems. Teeg had never been hungry, or scared. She defied
nothing, sacrificed nothing to be where she was; and she had no
family but the service.
Captain Barlon didn't have to score higher than ninety-eight
percent of the trainees merely to get the chance to fail
tactical training. Didn't have to dodge the slurs of his
yearmates, dispel the doubts of his instructors, in order to get
his commission. Didn't have to learn a new writing system from
scratch, a new technology, a new way of thinking, a new slang.
It was in Barlon's bones, as easy as breathing.
Even Crais's own renegade Officer Sun had never curled herself
into a corner of her bunk and chewed her lip til it bled, the
night before the final series of genetic tests. She'd never
feared being classified as a tech, or worse, a server, little
better than a manual laborer. She knew she was going into
Commando training -- she was born to service, wasn't she?
None of them would have sponsored Tauvo into Commando training,
just to have someone around who would understand. Who would
know *why* it mattered so much that he was captain of a Command
Carrier. That three thousand soldiers, four hundred Commandos,
two dozen Marauders, and fifty Prowlers answered to *him*. To
Bialar Crais, born in the mud of a drelnitz farm: the first
recruit to make Captain in three hundred cycles.
Tauvo knew, and was proud of him, as their parents never would
have been. Their parents, who had been ignorant and soft,
dirt-grubbers from the day they were born until the day they
died. They'd never have understood why Crais had mounted the
heads of three Hynerian resistance leaders in his quarters.
They'd never seen a wild Leviathan banking through the sixteen
rings of Mialsa VII, or the volcanoes at dawn on Pedsen-Kar.
Tauvo knew, and understood, and cared. Tauvo would have
understood the fire inside him, the rage. The need to crush
this Human under his boot like a Tarsian slivnot, to smear his
brains across the polished floor.
But Tauvo was gone.
All Crais had now was a ship full of cold soldiers like Teeg,
and no one to understand the subtle puns Fellish allowed, no one
to wink at him from the sub-officer's table in the commissary:
no one to remind him of why he wanted to be here in the first
place. Here where war was clean and everyone was well fed.
Tauvo was gone, and Crais could feel the dirt under his nails.
He let his fingers curl into fists. Thirty cycles, to bring him
to this place. Thirty cycles of curbing his tongue, losing his
accent, learning to kill.
Peacekeepers were, above all, practical. Revenge didn't further
the service.
"Lieutenant."
Teeg straightened even more, if that were possible. "Sir?"
Thirty cycles of his life, and only just now discovering he
wasn't really a Peacekeeper after all.
"Set a course for the Uncharted Territories."
END
Spoilers: The Premiere, The Hidden Memory
Disclaimer: not mine, no money changing hands
Notes: Set at the end of the pilot. A change in the speed or
direction of an object is a change in vector. Thanks, again, to Vehemently, who salvaged this, and Melymbrosia, who (again
Feedback makes me do the wacky. Send it to cofax7@yahoo.com.
