In the medlab, Wilma Gray slipped an oxygen mask over Ben Drake’s face and began taking inventory of his condition. He was breathing, albeit slowly, but from initial assessment it didn’t appear as though Kate had cracked his windpipe. It would be bruised from the constriction for a while, of that she was certain. All things being equal, though, she thought he was lucky.
“A boy just nearly died of strangulation, and I’m calling him lucky?” she suddenly thought. “I guess in the scheme of things,” she paused, realizing that what she was thinking would have been considered absurd no more than an hour ago, “half dead and free beats alive and under the heels of an oppressor.”
Gray went back to work on Ben, checking his blood pressure, heart rate, and lung sound. His pupils were sluggish and only somewhat responsive, and for a moment she lamented her lack of proper equipment. She needed a proper neuroscanner, one that could penetrate Drake’s brain to examine individual blood vessels. “I need one like the one I have back at home, dammit,” she spoke aloud.
Then the thought came crashing at her again, the one she had been holding back and trying not to voice for fear it would overwhelm her.
“There is no more home to go back to.”
Swallowing her anguish, she picked up another diagnostic tool and went back to work on making sure Drake survived.
Sarah and Gina deposited the limp, unconscious body of Kate onto her bed. The two stared at Kate for a moment, wondering what precisely to say about Stinson’s attempt to murder Ben. Coming up empty, Sarah reached down and moved the covers around the young woman’s body so that she was under them.
“I don’t want her to wake up and be cold,” Sarah said.
Gina tilted her head at Sarah. “She’ll probably be locked in here for a while. Seems like a decent comfort.”
“I’m not even sure this bucket even has a brig. Back then, unless you were a raving psychopath, no one was worried about locking up a fellow Earther. And prisoners were not taken. Not by ships like this, at least.”
“Who knows, Sarah? Maybe we’re living under those rules again right now. And whatever Kate is, she isn’t a psychopath.” Gina shrugged her shoulders. “At least she isn’t by my definition.”
Sarah turned slowly and headed towards the door. Gina followed a few steps behind, checking over her shoulder to make sure that Kate was still passed out. Outside, Sarah activated the comm. and hailed the bridge. “Captain? F.A. is safely in her quarters.”
The comm. crackled to life in response. “Acknowledged. Sealing her quarters now.”
Hearing the electromagnetic seals clank into place, Sarah and Gina began a slow walk towards the dining mess.
“I never ate,” Gina said.
“Starving, too.”
Gina’s face contorted for a moment, as though she was feeling great pain. “Ah, shit. Dammit dammit dammit dammit,” she said, burying her face in her hands and stopping in the middle of the corridor.
“What’s on your mind, Hime?”
Sarah noticed a tear rolling gently down Gina’s cheek. “I know I shouldn’t feel this way, I know I shouldn’t. I mean, shit, I discovered evidence of an alien invasion right under my feet, I rang the alarm for Armageddon way too late and the world, our world is basically gone.”
Putting her arm around Gina, Sarah pulled her close. “And there isn’t a single bit of that which isn’t absolutely horrific. You have every right to feel the way you feel.”
Gina’s head popped up, and she stared coldly forward. “Oh, it isn’t that at all, Sarah. I can’t even come close to comprehending that stuff right now, and if I did, I think I’d start screaming and maybe never be able to stop.”
“Then what’s bugging you?”
“I feel,” she swallowed, “a raging sense of jealousy. What Kate did… the end of the world came, and she acted and did something that was important to her and that meant something to her. I wish I had her courage.”
Sarah took Gina’s hands in hers and locked eyes with the distraught girl. “Believe me, I understand. We’ve all three wanted to do what Kate did to Ben. God knows, if I had the balls, I’d have made sure he had an airlock accident a long time ago.”
“So when push comes to shove with Captain Morrison?”
“We have Kate’s back,” Sarah answered. “All the way. The old rules? They just don’t apply anymore.”
“The old rules don’t apply anymore,” Richard explained to Jack. “There have always been strict regulations about scanning, whether it’s the frequencies you use, or in using non-EAD objects for amplifying your signal. It was always about avoiding disrupting communications, both civilian and military, and about territorial rights.”
“So in other words, who gives a damn anymore?”
“Precisely.” Richard removed the front panel from the ship’s main comm. controls. “Gotta figure that terrestrial satellites are either downed or at least jammed. No media broadcasts except for what the Omegans are sending out.”
“In both prior invasions, they hijacked the planetary emergency broadcast system.”
Park nodded eagerly. “Which is the most powerful radio signal Earth produces, even more so than the EAD’s hyperfrequencies. Those are more directional in nature anyway. But radio…”
“The universe itself produces radio waves naturally.” Jack began to understand where his shipmate was coming from. “So radio is really sort of innocuous. It’s God’s background noise.”
The engineer was pleased to see that he had gotten his idea across. “So if we piggyback our scanning onto the planetary emergency broadcast frequency, the Omegans will pay no attention to it. It’s just part of the background noise of the universe bouncing back at them.”
Jack applauded. “I like it. What kind of help do you need from me?”
Richard shrugged. “Well, I think I know what I’m doing, but I’ve never tried this before. And I’ve definitely never worked on comm. systems before. So what I need from you is…”
“What? Spit it out, man.”
“Well, there’s a chance I may electrocute myself here, so if you could make sure to kill the power so I don’t die…”
Jack rubbed his temples slowly, wondering not for the first time what his great-grandfather would have done if his resistance cell was saddled with a Richard Park.
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