I spent the next two hours feeling desperate, trying to make some sense of what happened, replaying the events of today, trying to assess all the mistakes I have made, and then being even more desperate.
After the two hours, I was visited by the big security guy with the ray rifle. He took me to a place which looked like a pocket-sized hospital, where an extremely grumpy man in his fifties performed all sorts of medical checks, tests and scans on me; the big guy was there the whole time, watching attentively. As soon as the grumpy man was done, the big guy took me back to my prison cell, and I went back to feeling desperate and meditating about my grim future.
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking.” A female voice came from the ‘ship’s sound-system unexpectedly and made me jump. The voice sounded a tiny little bit artificial, so I was sure it was actually the voice of the ‘ship’s AI and not the captain’s. How strange. “My ‘ship will disengage from the Iokasta dock structure in an hour, and we will commence our journey soon after. Please return to your quarters right now and remain there until further notice. Please do familiarize yourselves with the safety procedures, in particular with the procedures in case of hull breach or loss of pressure. Your space suits are located in the red box in your assigned quarters. You are legally obliged to put your suits on and run a full diagnostic right now; there is a user manual next to the ‘suits in the red boxes which will tell you how to do this. Please report either a successful test or any problems or unclear points to the ‘ship’s AI. Thank you.”
So the ‘ship was about to get under way, with me on board. I did not understand a thing anymore.
“Hello again.” This voice was familiar, but it was as unexpected as the announcement five minutes ago, and it made me jump all the same. Mess was standing on the outside of the bars and looked like she was about to open the prison and let me out. She was not wearing her hippie outfit anymore, but there was no insignia on her Flotilla uniform. “I had to make a lot of checks to ensure our safety, to verify you are who you say you are, and to make sure you are not going to be a source of some nasty surprise. Not that I do not trust you, but I do not trust the Iokasta secret police.” Shit. She was right. I could have been carrying, say, a bomb or an infection, without even knowing it. So this was the purpose of the medical exam. Fair enough.
“As you have heard, the ‘ship is about to disengage from the dock and leave Iokasta, and I have a question for you. Do you still want to leave Iokasta with us?”
“Yes, I do.” I said that without thinking. She was not entirely happy with that.
“This is your one last chance to pull out of this. If you want, I will let you out. You tell them whatever story you want, that I made you come to this ‘ship at a gun point and you made a last-minute escape, whatever. I don’t care. All I care about is whether you want to leave Iokasta on your own free will.”
“Yes, I do,” I repeated.
“Do you realize that you may not be able to come back, ever? This may be the last time you see your world.”
“I appreciate that, but if I stay, I am dead. I need to get out.” I decided to consider myself a refugee from now on, running away from my world because I would’ve faced persecution otherwise. “I know I will miss Iokasta terribly, but I cannot stay.”
“Sure?”
“Sure as hell.”
“Fine. All right. Kaa, please log what we said since the beginning of this conversation, verbatim.” Mess opened my prison cell and stepped aside. “You are now free to move around the ‘ship as much as any other passenger. If you could follow me, I will show you your quarters, and we need to do the diagnostic of your space suit asap.”
So that’s what we did.
Due to the artificial gravity of the ‘ship, I could not feel any acceleration; everyone had to rely on the announcements made by the captain or her officers. But they kept us informed to a reasonable extent, and after about six hours of the ‘ship moving away from my planet, I finally started to feel the tension to loosen. The last twenty-four hours had been intense. First, I locked the door of my flat and left my life behind, for ever, and then, what followed was… just crazy, impossible, up and down, roller coaster of emotions, hope and no hope, life and death.
I sat down at the tiny desk I had in my little room, took out my tablet and tried to write it all down as it came, raw, unedited, just to make sure I’d later be able to recall all the details. I wanted to be able to reconstruct what I was thinking and feeling and doing, and tell why I had made the decisions of the day. I also needed to make some sense out of it all.
It was fairly obvious to me that someone saved my life, but why? And why did it have to happen in this unofficial, stealthy way?
When I was done writing, I started again, writing the same story but with different details, different focus; I wanted to remember everything.
After a while, my thoughts were interrupted by a light signal above the door: a space ship equivalent of someone knocking on the door. I opened; it was Mess.
“Hiya. I am finally here to answer your questions. I guess you are eager to hear what the fuck that was.”
“Quite.” I let her in, and I noticed one little detail. She was still wearing her Flotilla uniform, but this time, her rank was fully disclosed. Her left shoulder bore two little pearly-white stars. I recognized the meaning: she was the fucking captain of this enormous ‘ship. Oh. My. God.
“First of all, let me apologize again for all the spy shit down there, and for treating you like a criminal once we got up here. As you now understand, I am responsible for this ‘ship, and I could not take any risks.” She took an identification card out of her pocket and put it in front of me. “From now on, I hope I will be able to play it straight. This is to answer your question from the ferry.” The who the hell are you question.
I picked up the card and examined it. It was a Flotilla thing, not a standard civilian ID. “Captain Eleni-Messia Ioannou Antoniou,” I read aloud. Just under the transcription, there was this: Ελένη-Μεσσία Ἰωάννου Αντωνίου. The date of birth made her twenty-nine, two years younger than me; the place of birth was given as Larissa, Greece; the address for correspondence was in Athens. According to the back side of the ID card, where Flotilla kept a short summary of her service, she joined Flotilla nine years ago as a cadet and progressed through the ranks relatively quickly; she commanded her first ‘ship at 24, was made captain four years ago, and assumed command of the Kalypso two months after being promoted. There were no records under disciplinary measures, and nothing under miscellaneous either.
“Nice to meet you,” she said when I stopped inspecting her career. “Virtually everyone in the known universe calls me Mess. Don’t ask, and feel free to call me the same.”
“That is not a very nice nickname,” I observed.
“No. But I told you, don’t ask.” She said it with a smile, and I had to chuckle. It was maybe not nice, but I knew people. It was tempting – and what kind of name was Messia anyway. “My parents gave me the name,” she said, as if she guessed what I was thinking about. Maybe this was not the first time she was having this conversation with people.
“Are you Greek?” I asked.
“What makes you think so?” she asked back, with a twisted smile. I decided to interpret this as ‘yes’. “Right. Anyway. Could you please do me a favour? Normally, we are not allowed to reveal our identities to the members of public, anyone outside Flotilla really, so – could you please not say my name aloud in front of other people, and especially the passengers?”
I agreed. Strange rule – but being from Iokasta taught me not to ask stupid questions. If you are to suffer for something, make it worth.
“Thanks. Now, I promised to talk to you about the price for this trip, who I am, what happened and why, and all sorts of things. Would you prefer asking questions, do you want me to tell you the story, or how do you want to proceed?”
“What was that supposed to be? Why did you help me?” Asking the burning questions, then let her tell me the rest, then more questions. I didn’t say that.
“I helped you because I was asked to do it by someone. I cannot tell you who this person is, I am sorry; I promised not to tell, or at least not yet.”
“I see. Umm, why exactly was the mysterious person interested in me?” She called it spy shit a minute ago, and that’s what it was.
“You are good at what you do, and you would have been in great danger if you hadn’t left Iokasta. Saving scientists from dictatorships has a long tradition, you know.” As far as I knew, as long as the second world war, maybe even longer.
“I see. How did you find me?”
“I was tipped off. My sources were sure you would travel from Talia that day. I was looking for you and saw you just before the previous ferry left – I suppose you wanted to board that one, but could not do so because of the police.”
“That’s right.” There were police officers patrolling on the previous ferry. I would have preferred the earlier one as it was scheduled to arrive six hours before the one I took and I wanted to get to the Port as early as possible, but I felt I could not afford the risk. “Why did you wait for me to speak to you? I could’ve missed you entirely.”
“Well, you missed me about seven times before you finally noticed me.” She smiled and shook her head. “I started to seriously panic after about eight hours of trying to make you talk to me, but then someone clever told me what to do, and that finally worked. But that does not answer your question. As you will appreciate, what I did was not legal. I needed you to initiate the contact between us. I needed to avoid anything that could be interpreted as tricking you into leaving, putting any pressure on you, or threatening or manipulating you in any way. If I contacted you first, that could be interpreted as luring you into leaving, and effectively kidnapping you.”
“What?” This was the second time she started talking about kidnapping someone.
“I am not sure how familiar you are with the Interplanetary Convention,” she said in a way which made it a question.
I shook my head: not at all, or not this part of it anyway.
“Well, kidnapping people and taking them away from their home world is one of the most illegal things you can do. It’s so illegal that I could easily be executed for that.”
“Oh!” I immediately felt more than a little uneasy. Now I understood why she kept asking the question, and emphasizing that I could walk away from her at any moment and stay on Iokasta.
“Yeah, well.” She shrugged. “Whatever. You are here now, that’s what matters. Any more questions?”
“Are you a spy?”
“No; not in the sense of having a second job or being paid by the secret service. I am a space ship captain. Sometimes, my tasks include something in addition to taking my ‘ship from one place to another, but that does not make me a spy.”
“Was this a spy thing? A secret service op? Organized by someone in the background using less-than-public information and all that?”
“Good question; I don’t know the answer. My best guess would be that it obviously was, but I didn’t ask where the information in my briefing came from. You will have to ask someone else.”
“Fair enough.” I smiled. Next, I wanted to know how many people potentially participated in this, so I asked how many people were there in her crew.
“I cannot answer that, as this information is classified.” Mess gave me a lightly ironic smile. “Don’t look at me like this, I did not invent the Regs.”
“You told me I would be willing to pay the price of this trip. How much, then?”
“Well, you just live your life in our space and do your thing, pretty much. The powers that be wanted to have you working on Earth or close by, because they thought your research was valuable.”
“Do I have to pay someone for this?”
“You mean in money? I don’t think so. They just wanted you out of there, with the results of your research freely available to them. As far as I know, they realize that they cannot force scientists into research; the scientists work best if they are free to do whatever they please.”
“Oh,” I said again. I was never regarded as valuable on Iokasta; on the contrary. I was also never confronted with this simple effect of freedom or lack of it, and I now realized this was really pure and 100% truth. Of course people performed best if they were free to do it their way, but try to explain this to the government of Iokasta.
“Yes, I know.” She said that with a lot of understanding – more than I’d expect from someone who grew up free and could pursue their dreams and probably see them fulfilled by the age of twenty-five.
“How much do you know about me and the reasons why I had to leave?” I felt a bit uncomfortable. She apparently knew more about me than I knew about her.
“Quite a lot. They gave me an extended brief before I landed on Iokasta. There were details, a lot of stuff.” She looked almost apologetic. “I needed the information to work out how to make a contact with you, how not to annoy or scare you off in the first three minutes, and all sorts of things.” There was a second of silence. “I am sorry about what happened to you and your family.”
I did not wish to discuss that; how my father was murdered by secret police, or how my mum died in prison, or how my little brother just disappeared; how my surname was taken away, replaced by a number; or how I was labelled a traitor. So I asked another question instead. “How did you manage to stay away from the secret police for so long? You are a bloody space ship captain; don’t tell me they just let you wander around like that.”
“They do let you go wherever you want if they don’t know who you are. When my ‘ship approached the Iokasta orbit, my second-in-command identified himself as the acting commanding officer. I was on the passenger list under the name of a non-existent passenger, and I had her passport, a genuine forgery if you will. I left the ‘ship using that passport and then returned using the same documents.”
“How did you get rid of my fake passport?”
“I didn’t.” She pulled the blue booklet from one of the pockets of her uniform and placed it in front of me. “I had a different plan. If they’d decided to search me, I would’ve identified myself as a Flotilla service person. I am not sure you know this, but if you are a Flotilla officer, you enjoy full immunity – it’s like diplomatic immunity. They normally wouldn’t be able to touch me without creating serious trouble for themselves, which we all hoped they wouldn’t be willing to undergo.” I was aware that Flotilla servicepersons enjoyed the equivalent of diplomatic immunity, but probably even stronger. Whoever touched them was asking for a full-scale planetary blockade, and no one wanted that to happen. Not even Iokasta dictatorship.
“Obviously, there would’ve been a problem with me travelling under a false name, but I had a cover story ready for that,” she added.
“This was most definitely a spy op,” I concluded.
“Well.” She shrugged again. “As I said already, I cannot confirm that.”
“How did you know I would follow you?”
“Oh, I didn’t. On the contrary, I was painfully aware how absurd my story sounded. But I decided to say as much as I could, use my most honest face and then let you decide. By some miracle, it worked.”
“It did; indeed it did.” And it was indeed a miracle. Or maybe her personal charm? I was not sure at all.
At that precise moment, the slightly artificial voice of the ‘ship’s AI requested the captain to return to the Cockpit, and she apologized and got up almost immediately.
“I am not sure I will be able to see you as much as I would like during the journey,” she said. “I mean, I am responsible for this ‘ship. I will try to visit you as much as my schedule allows, though. If you think of more questions, feel free to ask later, okay?”
And she left me once again.