Jordan got a call from Eleni one afternoon. He missed the call because he was in a hearing, so she left a voicemail for him.
“Jordan? This is Eleni Antoniou. Not sure you remember me – I am the Flotilla officer who was on trial for the Quetzalcoatl incident, and you got me out of trouble.” Of course he remembered her. It was difficult to forget your greatest success to date, and it was impossible to forget her. “The reason I am calling is that I really need a lawyer. Something happened – cannot give you details just like this because it’s all classified, but I am sure you will find it interesting. Anyway, I will try to call you again in the evening. Bye now.”
He tried to call her back twice, but the number was unavailable. He had to wait until the evening, when he received another call from her. When picking up the phone, he was wondering what sort of trouble did she get into this time.
“Hello, Eleni? This is Jordan.”
“Jordan. Thank goodness.” The video was disabled, but there was huge relief in her voice.
“Sorry for missing your call earlier. I was in a hearing, and then you were unavailable. How can I help you?”
“You have to save me, Jordan. There was a mutiny, I survived by miracle but obviously lost the ‘ship, and I had to break the Regs while saving my life – quite a lot actually. I just returned to Earth and the arraignment is tomorrow, and I would really like to have you as my legal counsel and my attorney. Are you available?”
“What?” Lost ‘ship? Mutiny? What? “Can you say it again and slowly, please?”
Eleni chuckled. “So, there was a mutiny. You know, like, my crew decided they didn’t want to follow my orders anymore. Then they declared their loyalty to 2HV alliance. They tried to kill me and my security officer, but we survived. The ‘ship’s obviously gone; they’ve taken her.”
“Okay, I get this bit. Shit.” Returning without a ‘ship was already enough for a court martial, and mutiny was highly unusual and potentially a big thing.
“Yeah. Unfortunately, I had to break a number of bending and space travel rules while saving myself and my security officer, so there’s a bit of a fuss over that as well.”
“Do you know the charges?”
“No, not yet, but there will probably be gross negligence. Possibly Convention violation, Articles 1 to 15 or so – basically the bending no-nos. Also, unlawful manoeuvres with a space craft, that’s almost for sure.”
“Plus the lost ‘ship, and the investigation whether you did enough to recover her and stop the mutineers, and also whether you induced the mutiny in some way.”
“Yes, and all that, yes.”
“Shit. You cannot keep yourself out of trouble, can you. What time tomorrow?”
“5 pm.”
Jordan checked his diary. He had that afternoon free of meetings and hearings; he wanted to work on something else, but hey, life of a lawyer. “I will be there. I will try to come at about 4 pm if that’s all right. You need to explain to me what happened.”
“Thanks, Jordan, you have no idea how much I appreciate this.”
“You were right, I do find this interesting. See you tomorrow, then?”
“Yeah, see you. Wait, there’s one more thing you should know – I am not in the usual place, but in the Flotilla hospital.”
“What happened? Are you all right?” Jordan let his voice sound concerned.
“I will be fine. I just got a bit of sepsis along the way, and I need some serious regen on my right hand. It’s complicated, I will explain tomorrow, okay?”
“Is there a police officer with you in the room right now?” Normally, in jail, she would be given a private room to call her lawyer, but in hospitals, it worked differently for security reasons. So – how much did she just inadvertently reveal to the investigators?
“No, she’s waiting outside. I promised I would only talk to my lawyer and nobody else and I would not ask you for anything illegal, and the officer trusted me enough to grant me some privacy. It’s all cool.”
“Lucky you. Are they going to do the hearing in the hospital, then?”
“That’s what they said. I cannot really leave this place right now, or travel anywhere, because my hand’s full of needles and looks like a porcupine or something. But there are some meeting rooms in the highest floor.”
“God. Are you in pain?”
“No, I am not. They are giving me some stuff. I would probably be screaming my head off if they didn’t, but that’s part of the regen they do on me. It’s a relatively new, experimental thing. Works fine, though.”
“And yet Flotilla insists on arraignment tomorrow.” Jordan’s palm hit his face. “Right. I’m going to download all the stuff right now and read through it, and I will see you tomorrow at 4 pm, you troublemaker.”
“Thank you, Jordan.” Once again, she sounded relieved.
“You can thank me afterwards.”
The next day, at 3.57 pm, Jordan was going through the door of Eleni’s room in the hospital. She was lying on her back in a hospital bed, the upper half of her body in restraints so she couldn’t move properly. The reason was obvious: her right hand was extended sideways and indeed looked like a porcupine – there were at least a hundred long needles protruding from her hand and forearm, which was covered in what looked like a thin, transparent film. There were also pumps and containers full of transparent yellowish liquids; it all looked very scientific and very Frankenstein-esque.
“Hello, Jordan. Please don’t look so worried, it’s all cool. They are just trying to save my hand – and it seems to be working, they say that one more week at most and I am out of here.”
“Wonderful, Eleni.” Jordan shook his head. “Given the circumstances, you look exceptionally well.” For the start, she was not pale, grey or green, and she did not look thin or exceptionally tired or sick.
“Yeah, thanks.” She smiled. She looked fairly unaffected by the situation and in good spirit.
“I will be outside,” the police officer in the room announced. “I expect you not to do anything… objectionable, captain.”
Jordan waited for the officer to leave them alone. “Now I can see why you cannot go anywhere. Care to explain what happened?”
“One of the mutineers did this to me – he stepped on my hand with his boot and something went a bit more wrong than would be ideal. But maybe I should start at the beginning.”
“Please do.”
To this cue, Eleni gave Jordan a detailed, forty-minute-long version of the story.
Jordan was taking notes and identifying the most important points throughout Eleni’s explanations. Due to the nature of the events, there were no records available, the log was gone, the ‘ship was gone, all the witnesses apart from one were inaccessible (and the one witness who was available was in and out of consciousness), and nothing could support – or disprove – Eleni’s version of the story. This could turn to either good or bad, and Jordan was determined to make sure it was the former.
“Let me summarize, then,” he said when Eleni finished. “You got a ‘ship with crew, which normally is against the rules – but not unheard of, and as there was the need to keep things moving and stick to the flight schedule, you accepted. The crew was weird, though, and you did not get along very well, especially not with your chief navigator.”
Eleni nodded.
“You obviously tried to make things work, but the chief navigator was too much of an asshole to help you. The rest of the crew adored her, so it just didn’t work, no matter what you did.”
She nodded again. “I am not sure what I should have done differently,” she added quietly.
“Probably nothing, Eleni – and the Regs and the Code of Conduct are on your side here. Fine. So it didn’t quite work, and then one day, you woke up with a gun right next to your head. They told you you were not their captain anymore and they would give you a one-person escape module – the spare one, and the tiniest the Ariella had – and leave you to your fate.”
Another nod.
“Your security officer was badly injured, beaten and shot with a ray rifle – twice, but you didn’t know that at that time. You were given the choice, and you took him with you. You knew that it would substantially reduce the lifetime of the module if you took two people in, but you did it anyway.”
“I asked them for a two-person module, but they said no. And I couldn’t leave my security officer in their hands.”
“No, of course not. So, you just took your chance and left the ‘ship. Just before they closed the locks behind you, one of the mutineers injured your hand. Then, they launched your module and disappeared.”
Another nod.
“You were in a lot of pain, but you did what you could to provide first aid for your security officer – and yourself. Then you took stock and found that you could in theory survive for about a week and you had enough fuel to bend exactly once. Yes, and even before finding out all this, you discovered that the module AI – normally this would be the Ariella’s AI‘s lower-level dormant emergency copy – was completely dead. You were left with an ordinary, totally unintelligent and very unhelpful computer. On top of that, some of the databases were deleted. You had some maps, but not the complete set, and notably the maps of your location were missing. You had working sensors. You had basic software to operate the engines, the sensors and the life support, but you had no software to help you navigation-wise and do the courses for you.”
“Yes. I thought we were deep in shit.”
“Undoubtedly. So, you worked out your position – using your own homemade software and also partly your own knowledge of the important galactic ‘landmarks’ and the cruise you were following with the Ariella, which you studied and memorized even before you left Earth.”
“Yes. They deleted the maps, but they didn’t delete the databases listing the prominent variable stars including their precise characteristics and positions.”
“How stupid of them.” Jordan just shook his head; the irony. “That was when you discovered the mutineers made unauthorised course changes, because you knew where the Ariella was supposed to be, but you were not at that place.”
“No, we were not. I concluded that they did at least one micro-bend without my knowledge, let alone authorisation.”
“Yes. And this had consequences. First, you were monumentally pissed off by their lack of respect for you; second, your module was dangerously close to 2HV territory; third, there was no way you could get to any sensible place and survive that trip using just conventional engines. Your conclusion was that seeking help in 2HV territory would mean your instant death, so you had to bend. There was no other way for you to survive, get back home and alert Flotilla about the war crime committed against you, your security officer, Ari the AI and Flotilla, the stolen ‘ship and her intel value for 2HV, et cetera.”
“Correct.”
“Now, you had no AI, so you prepared your courses yourself, using the unintelligent computer – you wrote your own software for that and you did the calculations. You did your prep, and when you were ready, you decided to go ahead and bend.”
A nod. “There was no other option apart from not bending and suffocating a week later.”
“Easy choice, I’d say. Well, okay. Before you proceeded, you considered the situation. Your security officer was obviously dying despite all your medical interventions. You knew your module would not last long enough for anyone to come and save you once the Ariella would be found overdue, so you decided to do something quite risky: bend and reappear about six hours away from the Arktos – the North Ecliptic One. This was not an easy decision for you, but you considered everything relevant: the sizes and masses of your module, the Arktos and the Sun, the distance of your reappearance spot from the Arktos and the Sun, the medical emergency, the lifetime of the escape module and the likelihood there would be traffic close to your reappearance spot. Your conclusion was that it was a pretty safe thing to do, with over 95% certainty that nobody but you would get hurt if things went awry.”
“98% if I remember correctly, as I also found the standard courses database and I planned to avoid the usual routes. But this can be checked, I kept my log.”
“And it will be checked, that’s for sure. You did the calculations several times to make sure you got it right, and then you decided to go for it and you bent. Things didn’t go wrong, and the moment you reappeared, you were spotted by the Arktos Defence and invited to surrender immediately. Which you did to avoid being considered a foreign invasion and wiped out of the universe. Your module was then towed to the Arktos, where you were taken to hospital immediately, because you had a fever and you were hallucinating.”
“Well, yes.” She described to him already how she kept talking to people who were not there.
“They gave you antibiotics, they cleaned your blood and they did an emergency surgery on your hand, and this saved your life. Same thing with your security officer: antibiotics, blood cleaning and a life-saving emergency surgery. In the meantime, they inspected the module you arrived in, and they discovered the missing fuses.”
Another nod.
“You didn’t inspect the engines of the module before bending beyond the most basic diagnostic, so you had no clue the fuses were actually missing.”
Yet another nod, this time accompanied by a slightly uneasy look.
“You didn’t inspect the engines because you were busy doing other things – saving your security officer’s life, trying to make your hand hurt less and not get any worse, trying to work out how to get back to human-inhabited space using only your tablet, your left hand and a computer which had a lot of computational capacity but no intelligence whatsoever.”
She nodded again. “It sounds easy but it was an awful lot of work,” she added. It sounded a bit defensive.
“No, it doesn’t sound easy, Eleni. It really doesn’t. Okay, anyway, you had absolutely no reason to assume that somebody had tampered with the engines and the fuses, or anything else for that matter. While you didn’t consider the mutiny to be spontaneous, you didn’t expect this level of preparation from the mutineers, because they told you they had had a vote and decided to let you go not long before they told you.”
A nod. “I expected them to shoot me straight away, and when they didn’t, I expected them to give me a standard escape module and leave me, not try to kill me like this. They could’ve killed me without wasting a bending-capable module; also, leaving you in a totally empty spot in the universe, far from everything, without an AI, with half your databases gone and with two people in a one-person module is bad enough, so why bother with removing fuses from engines? The whole situation just makes no sense. If they wanted to see me dead, there were twenty other, easier options. And, had things gone their way, I would’ve died without even using the engines, so what was the point?”
“Indeed. Now, even if you had known that the fuses were missing, you would have proceeded anyway, because you had no other options. The gamma node overload would destroy the module in the crease rather than upon reappearance, and there was no risk to anyone else than you.”
“That’s right,” she confirmed, and she sounded confident. Laws of physics, engineering and navigation were her domain, and her confidence in these was astounding.
“This looks okay, actually,” Jordan concluded. “You had reasons for everything you did – and they sound like good reasons to me. Also, you kept your log, so all this is documented.”
“Yeah, one thing the instructors drill into you in the commanding officers’ course is – always, always, always keep your log,” Eleni smiled.
Well, they are right. “In space, you are allowed to break almost any rule, provided you have reasons and you take precautions not to harm other people – which you apparently did, and it all sounds pretty reasonable to me. Of course you will be charged with negligence and whatnot – the authorities have to do it, just to force the investigation and make people avoid doing dangerous things without thinking. But overall, I think your chances are good and this time, the trial will be short and easy. Well done, captain.”
“Thanks.” Eleni looked at him with some hope and some scepticism. “I just hope you are right.”
“Yes, that remains to be seen. Well.” He checked the time. “Ten minutes to go. Where is the hearing gonna happen?”
“Probably here in this very room. The doctors told me in the morning that they wouldn’t allow me to go anywhere for at least a few more days. I mean, look at me.” The restraints only allowed her to move her head and her left forearm, nothing else. Those guarding her did not even need shackles or anything – the doctors and nurses took care of that.
“Oh, great. Does your dignity mean nothing to your employer?”
“Yeah… I refuse to take it personally. If someone wants to come here and have a look at me in this state, so be it.”
“You are very brave,” Jordan acknowledged. She seemed even more brave than when they first met, which Jordan hadn’t considered possible back then.
They spent the remaining ten minutes chatting about how life’s been since their last meeting and other ordinary stuff, and then, at 5 pm exactly, the judge entered the room, accompanied by the police officer and a bailiff.
“Good afternoon.” The judge had a look around the room. Her eyes stopped at Eleni’s hand, then continued towards her face. “Captain.”
“Ma’am,” Eleni acknowledged the judge. Her voice sounded respectful, but it all looked a little absurd. The judge appreciated the absurdity by a lightly ironic smile. Then, she turned to the lawyer.
“Mr Jordan. Nice to see you again.”
“Likewise, Ma’am.” Jordan and the judge shook hands.
“First things first. Are you in pain, captain?” the judge asked.
“No, Ma’am. Painkillers are included in the package.”
“Why exactly are you in all those restraints?”
Eleni duly explained: the doctors wanted to stop her hand from moving because of the needles, and the only way to do that was to keep her upper body as static as possible.
“That must be quite uncomfortable.”
“I admit it’s not great, but much better than amputation.” Eleni smiled, and the judge smiled back: of course it was better than losing one’s hand.
“Do you feel able to understand the charges against you and enter your plea?”
“I do, Ma’am, but I am not sure I am the right person to assess how much the medication is affecting me. I think I understand what’s going on around me and do not want to cause delays, but I equally do not want to take steps which could be challenged later.”
Jordan watched the scene with mix of light humour and pride. Eleni Antoniou, the most honest person on this planet. And the best thing is that the judge is totally on our side now, because in her eyes, Eleni is doing her best to be cooperative and facilitate this absurdity.
“I see. Thank you, captain, your willingness to go ahead with this is noted and appreciated. Mr Jordan, if you would like to file a complaint and a request for postponement of this hearing, I am ready to accept both. This is absurd.”
“Thank you, Ma’am. Yes, I would like to do that.”
“Your requests are granted. Do I have your word that you will let me know once your client is ready for the hearing, so that we can reschedule?”
“Yes, Ma’am, you have my word.”
“Thank you, Mr Jordan. See you later, then. If you excuse me, captain; I apologize for invading your privacy like this.” The judge nodded towards Eleni and left the room. The bailiff followed.
“Oh, wow,” Eleni said with a genuine surprise. “That was unexpected.”
“It was just common human decency.” To Jordan, it was not unexpected at all. “She did the right thing not to accept this bullshit.”