Ceteroquin: Can the Crew Hang On?
This is the tenth part of The Trapping of the Ceteroquin. This story appears in full in M/U's 2020 speculative fiction anthology, Demiurges and Demigods in Space, Vol. 1 and will be run as a serial online every Tuesday and Thursday for the next couple of months and each entry can easily be found here. To read this in its entirety, along with all of the other brilliant pieces included in the collection, you can obtain paperback and PDF copies in our store, with Kindle versions available on Amazon.
Things had not improved by the next morning.
The Captain caught hints of guilt and even shame on the faces of the carousing crew This could be cause for real concern. They didn’t believe in guilt and shame. These things weren’t part of their experience, their message, their mission. Their way. The monorail had left the track.
But there was nothing to be done until all this was over.
Just a little longer.
The final meetup for the officers wasn’t scheduled until after that evening’s dinnertime meeting. With the day free, they joined the others for their marketplace – which was fortunate because the rest of them were a sloppy, tattered mess.
There was no more arguing about how long they’d been aboard the orbital station (though they had never come to any sort of actual agreement), and they ceased to trade accusations (though it was similarly clear that all of them, the priest included, had continued to involve themselves in some really torrid entanglements). They were simply too tired and chemically addled to keep it up.
They had not taken the Captain’s advice. Most of them had intended to, until Frank Mario wickedly went door to door with the fresh drugs he’d scored. Potent though the substance had been, the diminishing returns inherent to the second consecutive night of indulgence meant that they all did at least fall asleep for some period of time, even if no one was under any illusion that this was an improvement. There were times in which merely a couple hours of drug-addled sleep could be worse than biting the bullet and muscling straight on through.
But it was too late to do anything about that.
Haggard, barely awake, they were barely speaking, barely even able to properly dress themselves. This wasn’t the gentle, almost-elegant semi-nudism common aboard the ship (which wouldn’t have been welcomed on the orbital station in any case), but carelessness. Four of them were sent back to their rooms for failing to meet the basic standards of decent attire. Laura had given this instruction so the Captain wouldn’t have to.
*
The evening briefing was another insubstantial affair. They’d spent the day all together, for the most part, and without any incidents of note. The hours had passed as expected, with Hancock and Laura and Ben picking up the slack for their temporarily handicapped comrades. The rendezvous was still yet to come. There was nothing yet to report and no instructions to give.
No instructions but one: Hancock asked that at least some of them remain in their rooms to await the safe return of the officers.