090: MANAGEMENT

Captain Sands listens carefully to my explanation, frowning at the computer. He pulls out a notepad and runs the numbers manually himself. Then he frowns at the computer again.

“It’s a coincidence,” he says.

“A coincidence? That if you line up everyone on the ship in order of priority for captaincy, they form two neat groups of convicts and two neat groups of non-convicts? That the size of the non-convict leadership group and the convict site leader group are exactly what you’d expect for a convict population of four thousand? That, from the very limited pool of revived colonists we have, everyone in the leadership group seem to be already aware that they’re on a convict ship upon revival and everyone from the civilian group aren’t? Hell of a coincidence.”

“There’s no reason to do things this way!” Captain Sands insists. “Why? Why not prioritise them properly?”

I raise an eyebrow. “As opposed to all the other roles, which have been oh-so-carefully prioritised, based on work history and some half-arsed aptitude tests? Think about it. I’m the ship psychologist right now, because I was 178th in line, even though I am very obviously absolute shit at individual psychology. Why did I score so high? My guess is, whoever was making the decisions figured that sociology was Close Enough to psychology and prioritised accordingly. You’re higher than everyone else here on the replacement engineer priority scale, but there were many, many engineers above you. Probably because you weren’t actually an engineer for all that long, you had less experience. But as a replacement on this specific ship, you should’ve been incredibly high, because you helped design the damned thing. You’re a more useful engineer here than the world’s leading expert on power generation systems, if said expert doesn’t know shit about the Javelin’s cooling or engines or anything. The whole thing is a shitshow. Are you sure we haven’t been through this before? I’m certain we’ve been through this before.”

“Maybe. A lot’s been going on.”

“You haven’t been using this priority system to pick new crewmates?”

“Why would I? I just check to make sure candidates aren’t convicts and that they have halfway decent leadership skills in case of an emergency.”

By which he means a decently high ranking that’s lower than his own, I assume.

“You’d think the people who built this would take this priority system seriously. It’s kind of important.”

“No, it isn’t. Think about it. You’re an astronaut, and your head doctor dies. What do you do? You don’t start waking up fucking civilian doctors. You look at the ship’s needs, and figure out if you can get by with just the secondary doctor, and with a crew of twenty just hanging out in a spaceship in case something goes wrong, you probably can. If you can’t, you raise the other astronaut crew’s head doctor. If you lose another doctor, you raise their secondary doctor. You need to lose four doctors before it becomes necessary to start reviving civilians, and a ship that’s lost four doctors is almost certainly so deeply fucked that it no longer matters. If you’re dipping into more than your first three or four top priority civilians, there’s something going on onboard that’s going to doom the ship faster than slightly-less-competent medicine can.

“And for the captaincy, it’s doubly a joke. Your captain dies, what do you do? You don’t wake up a random fucking civilian to take control of the ship – they don’t know your crew! They don’t know what’s going on! You elect an existing crew member to command – or, if you want to do things the Tarandran way, promote your second-in-command. Whatever. Point is, no matter how many doctors or engineers or maintenance officers you replace, your captain is going to be the most competent person who was on the original crew, who was trained for this and knows the crew and knows what they’re doing. The captain priority list doesn’t matter until you run out of astronauts. At which point you’re already fucked.”

“We ran out of astronauts,” Captain Sands points out.

“And we’re clearly doing fantastically and aren’t fucked at all. The whole ‘replacement crew priority list’ seems like something that someone came up with in a committee meeting and was implemented because doing so was less work than arguing about it. Look at our ship; the astronauts didn’t think it was a good idea to revive any replacements, and when we had to, we certainly didn’t use the priority list as anything more than a general guide. Even the AI revived me against priority list protocols because it correctly judged that ‘someone who’ll survive and recover from chronostasis really quickly’ was more important to the immediate task than the priority lists.”

“Why, though? Why this particular prison system?”

I shrug. “Boring answer? I suspect the job of doing the lists was given to someone who was in charge of prisoner selection and they just threw it in because it was a system they were familiar with and they wanted to go to lunch. But of course there’s the more complicated answer.”

“The more complicated answer.”

I nod. “This is a convict ship. The four list groups are pretty clear reflections of the roles we’d be expected to play on Hylara. The list might double as an organisational aid for this – either intentionally, as in this priority list was used to store this information on purpose so that people can check the status of someone they’re reviving via their priority for captaincy, or unintentionally, as in this list was created as some kind of resource or chain-of-command or area access system for the colony, and someone just duplicated the data for the captaincy priority because they didn’t want to have to make a new completely pointless list for it.”

Captain Sands stares at the computer screen a bit more. Then, awkwardly, he looks up his own name. 96th in line for the captaincy. He quickly runs the numbers; he’s just barely in the top 20% of the leadership group. That still seems pretty high to me, but he frowns at the screen.

We’re trying to solve a murder; I don’t have time to coddle my captain’s apparently fragile ego. I put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not like you’ve ever given a shit about these priorities anyway,” I point out, “or you wouldn’t have taken Tinera’s logistics job from her.”

“We can be sure that the rankings within each group are correct, though, right?” he asks.

I shrug. “Probably not? If it’s copied from an authority or resource allocation system or whatever for the colony, it’s probably mostly political. Or based on other stuff like, people who are good at security work would be higher, if it’s for security access or something. Who knows?”

“How high are you, within the… ‘civilian group’?”

“I don’t remember,” I lie.

“What about the other crew members? Who’s – ”

“Why do you care? Aren’t we a bit too busy for this right now?”

He gives himself a little shake. “Yes. You’re right. None of this computer stuff matters, and once we’ve convicted our murderer, everything will stabilise.”

“It seems pretty stable right now. Considering everything that’s going on.”

“I’m spending so much time fielding random complaints and petitions for the locked-up suspects, about how Tal couldn’t have done this and Denish would never do that and Lina is a doctor, obviously she’s innocent, as well as outright hostility from all of the suspects who don’t seem to realise that the sooner they help us convict this murderer, the sooner we can return to normal. You’d think that people would be more concerned about having a crew member who knifed two of our fellow crew members to death, but apparently enforcing basic security makes me the bad guy. And this Heli situation has certainly not made anything better. I don’t suppose you have any enlightened suggestions about what I should do with her to satisfy everyone’s primitive revenge fantasies?”

“Well, I’d like a chance to punch her in the face. I haven’t had a go yet.”

“And violence has been so effective at solving our problems so far.”

“You didn’t say solve problems. You said satisfy everyone’s primitive revenge fantasies.”

“What should I do with her, Aspen?”

Whatever you plan to do with our other criminal, I think. If it’s good for the murderer, it’s good for the rapist. But I don’t say that. The point of laws and procedures of justice is to save us from our own worst impulses. “I don’t know. And I don’t envy you the choice.”

“I don’t think I’m ever going to forgive you for putting me in charge of this place.”

I fight to keep a straight face at that one. I vividly recall just how eager he was to take command of the ship, leaving the medbay against doctors’ orders to get registered. But he’s avoiding as much I-told-you-soing as possible over the whole convict murderer thing and I owe him the same courtesy.

Besides, I haven’t forgiven me for that, either. Not that I’d have been any better at this current crisis – I hadn’t predicted the murders, or Heli. But still.

Captain Sands stares into the middle distance and mutters, “I can’t believe this happened. I was trying to protect him.”

Him? Who? “Adin?”

“He’s a nice guy, but you know that man has the courage and resilience of wet paper. Pathologically incapable of standing up for himself or showing any force of will, that’s why people like him fall prey to drug addiction in the first place. I needed focused crew; I wanted that leash off him, for his own good. I didn’t account for someone like Heli being here to use it against him.”

“You didn’t think that maybe his doctor was in a better position to – ”

“Who, the mass murderer? No, I didn’t think it was in a better position to make healthcare decisions. Doctors aren’t all nice people, Aspen, especially not the ones with a recorded history of abusing their patients through misuse of drugs! Supporting his addiction doesn’t help anyone. He needed to be off those things, but I should’ve been more vigilant. I knew how weak willed he was. I should’ve kept more of a personal eye on things to make sure he actually got off them. Heli shouldn’t have had that avenue.”

This isn’t the best time to argue about addiction treatment practices. “Without Adin, she would’ve found another soft target.”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose that she would have.” He pulls himself together in a few seconds and puts his Confident Captain Face on. “Well. Anyway. This issue only makes the ship more unstable. We need to finish up with this murder investigation as quickly as possible so we can release our innocent suspects, deal with Heli and bring things back into proper order. We’re going to have to get more aggressive about getting rock-solid proof for what Lina did.”

“It still might not be Lina,” I say, unconvincingly. “Denish is probably strong enough to have stabbed the Friend without injuring himself.”

“And Lina coincidentally injured her arm on the same night? How would Denish have gotten the drugs, since they they didn’t come from the cabinet that had been broken into?”

“Both Celi and our living Friend have access to – ”

“The Friend, who was bedbound and very clearly had no idea that drugs had been used? Or Celi, who did the stocktake and brought this to our attention in the first place? Celi could very easily have dragged kes feet on the stocktake, if the results were going to incriminate kem. Or lied, even. Lina is our only reasonable suspect for the drug theft, her position wasn’t accounted for at the time of the murder, and she had injuries consistent with the kind of strain expected from relying on desperate strength to stab our expired Friend with such force. She is our only reasonable suspect.”

He’s right, of course. “Why don’t you go and release the others right now, then?”

“Because, Aspen, no matter how obvious it is that Lina is our murderer, the rest of the crew are unlikely to accept this as sufficient evidence for something as serious as a murder charge. We’ll need to eliminate the other suspects a little more reliably, and if we can, try to get a confession, or at least some eyewitness corroboration.”

“What eyewitness corroboration? You’ve already asked everyone in Habitation Ring 2 what they saw. They can’t magically generate new data.”

“You seem very sure that they were being honest. People like that will go to surprising lengths to dodge justice, even on behalf of a friend.”

I ball my hands into fists and try not to remember cleaning prints from the murder weapon.

“The AI’s not being helpful?”

“Not in the least. I’ve queried even with the knowledge that it’s Lina and it’s still finding ways to tell me nothing about who went into that ring except Tal, and I think we can safely say ke’s innocent. Unfortunately, everyone who’s got both competency and experience at getting anything out of that debted machine is a suspect.”

“You said yourself that Tal’s innocent. Get kem to ask.”

“Ke’s still a suspect.”

“How can ke be both known to be innocent and – ?”

“Because, Aspen, you and I might know that Lina must have done this, but people get cold feet when it comes time for conviction. We need our case to be as rock solid as possible if we want the rest of the crew to accept it. A lot of the crew love Tal, but giving a suspect who’s a notorious cybercriminal and confidence trickster access to the computers and letting kem find electronic evidence that just so happens to incriminate someone who isn’t kem? That introduces way too much uncertainty. We need stronger evidence to convict her, or the crew’s going to balk.”

What’s there to balk at? “You are just going to lock her up, right?”

“I suppose that would depend on the details of what specifically happened. Everything we have certainly suggests that this is a cold, premeditated killing, especially with the drugging, but on the off-chance that it’s somehow self defence…”

“And what are you going to do to her if it’s not self defence?”

“Here’s a better question, Aspen. What’s the justice system of Hylara going to do to her? We’re going to get to our planet, eventually. We’re going to wake everyone up, eventually. There will eventually be proper law and order and, as much as I know you don’t like it, a system put in place that accounts for a massive convict labour force. Even putting aside how many people Lina probably killed on earth… she’s a convict who killed two crewmates, two non-convict crewmates, with a knife. How do you think Hylara is going to deal with that? Do you think the Texan prison system tolerates violence of any kind towards guards, staff or civilians? Do you think Hylara will? These people have killing devices implanted in their hearts to keep them in line on the planet; do you think anyone on Hylara is going to tolerate this? Lina Chisolm is dead. What you’re asking me is whether I intend to lock her up for a few years first, causing massive danger and disruption, taking up life support resources that could go to rousing a productive crew member, and being unnecessarily cruel to Lina. Now, I am going to Habitation Ring 2. I’d like you to join me, but I won’t make you.”

“What are we doing? Interrogating Lina?”

“No. Adin again. He’s probably calmed down by now, and I’d like to close off all avenues of suspicion towards anyone else and get this whole dirty business wrapped up as quickly as possible.”