Derin Edala

102: BED

We settle into a new routine surprisingly quickly. Lina’s still processing samples from her previous braindead patients (now in the freezer) and the Friend is slowly picking through Captain Kinoshita’s notes to see if we’ve missed anything of note in there, but on the whole, the crew is more interested in the future than in digging up more unpleasant surprises from the past.

And the present. We’re very interested in staying alive in the present, too.

There’s a certain le...

Patreon ID bonus -- Lina's Javelin ID card

ID chips were implanted into colonists shortly before stasis for recognition aboard the ship and new colony, but during the training, accommodation and boarding process, it was more convenient to use these paper ID cards.

101: GRIEF

The structure of a Texan funeral is jarringly unfamiliar to me in practice, but I’m well versed in the theory. Death rites tell you a lot about a culture, and there’s probably no sociologist alive in any society who doesn’t understand how to bury a body.

The Texans say that the soil isn’t quite deep enough for their traditionin the greenhouse ring, and want to dig all the way down to the ceramic, but I persuade them that it’s better for the bodies to have a good layer of soil ...

100: CAPTAIN

While I wait for my next client, I grab a notepad and run some numbers.

There are two thousand, nine hundred and eighty six colonists still in chronostasis, out of an original five thousand. That includes the survivors of the original crew. They have an average revival rate of… well, I don’t know how to look it up without Amy, but let’s say sixty eight per cent. Plus eight current crew. Assuming no further problems, no more disasters or deaths or nasty new experimental surprises, ...

Ask Me Anything -- Lina chisolm

Who first started the discussion to deactivate the kill switches amongst the crew?

The Friend brought it up to me while I was still recovering from chronostasis, so I assume it did so with everyone.

Did knowledge of Aspen threatening the Javelin CEO make you more amenable to telling them the truth of the situation re: being convicts trying to deactivate your kill switches?

No, when I’m concerned that somebody might kill me, their history o...

099: TAL

The medbay is empty except for me, Tal, and the two of Lina’s comatose science projects who survived the problems of the computer shutdown and subsequent transfer to this ring. Tal sits on the end of the unoccupied bed, looking at kes hands. Not at me.

I have no idea what to do here. I learned as much as I could about psychology in the brief time before this session, but fuck. Not for the first time, I wish our psychologist hadn’t been violently murdered by a cultist.

“How a...

098: LOBOTOMY

“What do you mean, you told her to?” I ask.

“And why now?” Lina asks.

“She did it now because she couldn’t before. I restored her proper environmental controls and she went straight to it.”

“You restor – you cracked Reimann’s password?”

“Oh, yeah. Turns out it was really easy. I can’t believe it took me so long to think of it, it should’ve been obvious as soon as we found his arm in that wall.” Ke touches the bleeding wound on kes...

097: STABILISE

I’m still at the keyboard, so Captain Klees turns to me. “Where is everyone? Is anyone in CR5?”

I check. “Nobody’s in CR5. Well, except all the chronostatic colonists, I guess. Denish and Tinera are in HR2 on the other side of CR5, and seem to be staying put. Everyone else is on our side, and most of them are coming this way. Probably to ask you why you’re ejecting the ring.”

“Most of them?”

“Tal is close by in NAER1, but looks to be staying put.”

Behind the Keyboard -- Keldin Sands

096: REVIVE

I wake up in a bright room, littered with IVs and monitoring equipment and with an oxygen mask on my face. I carefully reach back to disconnect the cerebral stimulator from the port in my skull.

But there’s no stimulator there, just a slight bump where my skin has grown over the port, and after a moment of sheer, panicked confusion, I remember that I’m not waking up from chronostasis. That was ages ago. I’m…

“Aspen!” Lina’s face comes into view, a bit blurry and unne...

095: DEFUSE

I stare at Tal for a bit, but no further explanation is forthcoming. “I don’t…?”

“You too, Aspen! All of us are so fucking stupid! I have to try something! If this actually works I’m going to be so pissed off at myself!” Ke spins on kes heel and quickly disappears between the crates.

“Is whatever you figured out important to this mutiny thing?” the captain calls after kem.

“No!”

“Best to leave kem to it, then,” he shrugs. “I’m sure ke’ll...

094: IDENTITY

I wake up in my own bed, and for a moment it seems blatantly obvious that the recent confusing events were a strange nightmare.

Then I look down, and realise I’m still in my clothes. There are little aches all over my body, and when I move, pain wells up in my right hip, bringing with it the vivid memory of being slammed into the metal frame of a hospital bed by Heli. I don’t even have to look to know how deeply bruised it must be.

The most persistent ache is a particularly sh...

093: DESPERATION

Captain Sands backs away behind a bed, but I’m faster. He’s almost within reach before Heli shoulder-checks me directly into the metal frame of the bed. Pain blooms in my hip as I drop to the floor, my improvised weapon rolling out of my grip, and before I can get up again, she’s dragged me a safe distance away from him and has me pinned to the floor. Heli’s one and a half times my weight and, judging from the way she’s holding me down, seems to have some kind of combat or wrestling...

092: GUILT

“Excellent,” Captain Sands says. “If we’re lucky, we might be able to avoid any further unpleasant business.”

I watch him leave the room. “I think I hate that guy,” I remark.

Celi raises an eyebrow. “I thought you two were friends?”

“What gave you that impression?”

“Um. Everything? Actually, on that note, I… need to talk to you about something. Something to do with Kinoshita’s notes.”

“You found something new?”

“No. Just�...

Patreon bonus -- the Public Universal Friend (the other one)'s Javelin ID card

ID chips were implanted into colonists  shortly before stasis  for recognition aboard the ship and new colony,  but during the  training, accommodation and boarding process, it was  more convenient to  use these paper ID cards.

091: DURESS

“Heli has been disciplined,” Captain Sands informs Adin in our makeshift interrogation room. “And after we’ve solved this murder, I’ll be able to deal with her more thoroughly.”

“What do you want, Keldin?”

“Just to clear up some final details. Heli Graf provided you with neurostimulators, yes?”

“Yes, you already know that.”

“But she did not provide you with sedatives to kill Renn and the Friend?”

“Of course not! What’s the point of...

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 ...

Ask Me Anything -- Keldin Sands

What were your initial thoughts upon being woken up and told you're the captain now?

For a solid week, I was dead certain that I was dreaming. I mean. I went to sleep under the assumption I’d be waking up in orbit around Hylara, then suddenly I’m waking up in the medbay but we’re still years away and the crew isn’t there and instead there’s these new people and the captain is Doctor Aspen Greaves? And then everyone’s like, oh, actually you’re the captain n...

089: TRUMPS

Lina, Denish and I gather at a small table that had been set up near the laundry room for Arborean Trumps. Denish makes the obligatory joke about me having a natural advantage by being Arborean, Lina deals us twelve cards each while explaining that they have a ‘no murder talk’ rule at the game table, and I sit keenly aware that I’m right between the two biggest suspects for committing the actual knife murder and yet I feel safer than I have since this whole thing began.

“How are...

088: RIFT

I watch the footage several times, as if that will somehow make it make more sense. It doesn’t. There’s no reason for Heli not to be involved, I guess, I just… why? She’d been awake for less than a week at this point! Renn hadn’t even made his position clear on Lyson projects yet, so what was the motive? Personal beef with her psychologist? And why involve another person to wield the knife instead of just poisoning them to death? A patsy, maybe; make them look guilty and skip the bl...

087: ACCOMPLICE

Sunset’s eyes widen, and I regret my words immediately. They’re correct,  but the immediate aftermath of a murder in a confined space probably isn’t the time to be reminding people not to trust their neighbours. If anyone in Habitation Ring 1 is involved, the truth will come out when we prove that Adin – or someone else, if it was someone else – actually held the knife. There’s no sense in creating further chaos in the meantime.

Ah well. Most people would’ve figured t...

Behind the Keyboard -- the Public Universal Friends

086: CONFESSION

We head for our temporary interrogation room. The Friend collapses onto the bed and puts its head in its hands.

“I’m going to be up-front with you, Friend,” Sands says. “You don’t look to be in a physical state to have killed anyone. Were you working alone?”

“Yes.”

“So you killed two people and don’t have a physical mark on you, but you can barely walk.”

“It was a surge of adrenaline. It happens.”

“Hmm. Alright, walk us through it, the...

085: DRUG

“You saw Adin?” Captain Sands asks. “Making his way in the direction of Renn and the Friend, right before the murders?”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t going to NEAR 2,” Tal says. “He was just dipping into Storage Ring 5 to grab more alcohol, it was right next door to the others.”

“How long until he came back to the Habitation Ring?” I ask.

“I’m not sure, I was doing other stuff.”

“Thank you, Mt Smithson,” Captain Sands says, walking abruptly out o...

084: INTERROGATION

“So you guys didn’t find any bloodstained clothing, then?” I ask. “Any signed confessions? Nobody broke down crying and explained why and how they did it?”

“Not yet. They are, very suspiciously, doing a lot of laundry at this exact moment, so I daresay we were too late on the bloody clothing front.”

“That’s not suspicious. They’ve been doing laundry all afternoon. You know how it is; you move, and it’s a good opportunity to get round to washing all your linen...

083: SCENE

The six of us – Heli, Sunset, Sam, Celi, the captain and I – stare at the scene in Network and Engineering Ring 2. It’s exactly as I’d left it – the Friend (the non-doctor one) sprawled face-first in a pool of blood almost in the doorway, kitchen knife in its back. Renn, throat sliced open, collapsed against a desk and surrounded by shards of glass.

Celi looks at the captain, a silent question. The captain gives kem a nod, and ke pulls on a pair of clean gloves and kneels to i...

082: ALIENS

It’s movie night.

And for once, it’s fairly sparsely populated. Seven of us gather in Network and Engineering Ring 1 to play Sunset’s favourite computer game about twelve hours after my talk with Captain Sands, and it’s not the people I would’ve expected to see. One of the Friends (the doctor one) is missing, still holed up the medbay and drugged to the eyeballs on painkillers for its unexplained muscle cramping problem, and Lina’s probably tending to it and making sure it d...

081: ANTARCTICA

“Um,” I say, intelligently, like the seasoned intellectual that I am. “What?”

“Aspen, do you know why the Javelin Program took off in the first place?”

“Of course. With the Kleiner Array, people saw viable exoplanets with a clarity never before seen, and the Exodus Phenomenon – ”

“Like with you, there was an inciting incident. You’re a sociologist who specialises in Neocambrian-era civilisations; I imagine that you know quite a lot about Mars?”

...

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Who should the next AMA character be?

Ask Me Anything -- Denish

How did you become a space pirate?

Is family business. We acquire stranded ships, no registration, or follow distress signals where crew in distress does not answer. Very often crew is dead, and if heirs want to inherit ship and cargo… well, no registration. Who knows who own ship? No need to tell government.

Is very easy to strip registration off ship.

Could you tell us about one of your memorable heists?

‘Memorable’ heists alwa...