Ceteroquin: Departing the Blue Striper
This is the eleventh 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.
“We might not be soldiers, but we are professionals and we do have a very real and a very serious mission, which is the goddamn reason we travel the stars together in the first place!”
Most of them had never seen Hancock like this. This time – it was now the following morning’s meeting – he didn’t mind if they felt some degree of guilt and shame, Group ethos be damned! They deserved it. They hadn’t been in their rooms when the three officers had returned. None of them! Not a single one of these highly trained, highly gifted, highly specialized Agents of the Mysteries had been able (or willing) to follow the one simple mild instruction – to wait for what ultimately proved a mere two hours - he’d bothered to give the entire time. If ever there was a time to pull out the notion of “insubordination”, it was this one.
There hadn’t even been an excuse. Most of them seemed to think they should get some sort of credit for the fact that they’d stayed away from the stimulants and opted instead or different, equally as brain-tilting intoxicants, and had continued deepening their weird (at this point incomprehensible) bacchanalian orgiastic entanglements. That was it. The reason none of them could be bothered to remain faithfully in their rooms to ensure the safe return of their beloved shipmates was just that they were busy gambling and trawling for attractive strangers to draw into their seductive web.
After some initial protests, they all gave up their defensiveness. He was right, after all. They knew from that sense of guilt and shame. They knew they deserved it, too – knew it even without the Captain’s rebuke. But they also knew they deserved even that.
It all weighed very heavily: what if Hancock, Ben, and Laura hadn’t come back? What if one or two of them had come back seeking help? If things hadn’t gone all right, all six of them had effectively abandoned their own de facto officers to some unknown and grisly fate. The more it continued to sink in, the severity of their collective offense, the more each of them wondered what business they actually had playing this game in the first place. The Captain was right. They’d been tested and they’d all failed.
Fortunately, the mission hadn’t failed and everyone was all right. The enigmatic nature of the three officers’ business had continued; once again, nothing had ultimately seemed amiss, making the whole thing seem more eerie than ever. For the third time, they’d followed the instructions, this time the ones given to the Captain, this time going to the back annex of one of the sanctioned local Religious Centers. This was considered especially dangerous. The RCs were the approved venues for allowed religion, and it was this allowed religion that the forbidden Mysteries of the Group supplemented, subverted, and transcended. They were watched more closely for Group infiltration, which of course the Group actually was engaged in, all across the galaxy. If this seemed especially dangerous in a place like this one, such was the nature of this mission.
They had been sitting in a pew of a small and empty auxiliary chapel when eventually they were joined by an old priest with an abnormally large, bald head. He seemed a little batty, but they knew it could have been part of his religious affect. He delivered to them a short message – similar to the others without being related, contradictory, or complementary – and then he had left.
No lasergun battle. No ambush. Just another message. They’d all expected to be waylaid or at least followed on the way back to the casino. Nothing.
It was time to leave. It no longer mattered that they hadn’t stayed the full week. The Captain finished his tirade and moved on. They’d accomplished the mission, there was no reason to linger – and, at this point, there seemed to be many, many reasons not to. There would be no post-embark debriefing in the control room. Everyone was instructed to retire, and it was implied that they ought to put a pause on the tawdry. Time for everyone to regroup and get it together at long last. They’d talk things over only after half a day aboard the ship, after having zoomed through multiple hyperspace jumps and securing themselves in friendlier space. Tomorrow would be a new day, a fresh one.
“I think perhaps…” the priest interjected hesitantly.
The Captain glowered at him.
“I just wonder if we might not all benefit from going forward with the debriefing, actually.”
“You know what, Father Nick,” the Captain said acidly, “we’ve been doing two debriefings a day for several days now, and I’m really not sure it’s done much good. And I’ll say something else, Father, if I may in my impatience and intemperance be granted the liberty of doing so: you can hold off on the clerical high ground for a little while until you’ve managed to earn it back.”
The priest hung his head. Hancock immediately felt bad. Then he was irritated with himself for feeling bad. But he was not as hard a man as he wanted to be, even with all his years as a ship’s commander. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Group members were not supposed to be like this with one another.
Whatever else might be in need of repair, the mission was over, and it had been successful. If there had been a trap, they seemed to have sidestepped it, against all odds. Irritated as he was, the Captain intended to parlay all of this misery into a real stretch of R and R – somewhere beautiful, outdoors, and sparsely populated, and someplace with no casinos and at least fewer opportunities for vice and insanity. After that, he would accept nothing less than standard, routine missions for quite some time. He knew he’d be within his rights to do so. The crew deserved all that just as much as they’d deserved the dressing down. For now, at least, it was like this, and like this the Ceteroquin and all aboard it departed the Blue Striper for open space.