J Mauldin - Final Solution

I went back to my quarters and made lunch, heating up two trays of food, then took a seat. I poured a couple glasses of water while waiting on my assistant. On cue, he came scurrying through the door looking extra jumpy.

“Hey, eh, señor David,” César said, scratching his dry arms with long fingernails.

I poked at the usual pile of steaming slop and frowned. I bet the Comm would be having steak tonight. “You alright, César?”

His eyes darted around the room, fixing for little more than an instant on anything in particular. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine, I think… I don’t know.”

“Sit down.” I slid him his tray of food. “Eat up. You’re all skin and bones, son.”

“Good idea. Good idea.” He tore into his tray, shoveling mounds into his gullet of an artificially flavored mush infused with protein and carbs called AFiN (Adaptive Freeze-dried Nutritional Base) aka “Slop”. The stuff wasn’t terrible, and truthfully, it wasn’t all we ate, even if it felt that way most days. It had the consistency of mashed potatoes, but when dispensing, it could be flavored with a wide array of thirty six options. Today, I’d picked Italian. Spaghetti Autentico , slop al dente.

I leaned back in the chair and crossed my arms. “You’re from the lowest levels on Mars, right? Valles Rojo, where the Colombian Initiative settled.”

César nodded. “Si, señor. Valles Rojo.”

“Tough down there?”

“You could say that.” He swallowed another bite, fork hand shaking in his hand. “Mama, Dios bendiga , had a serious problem with crystal after she lost her admin job. You know how it is, señor, you plug into VR and smoke a little rail, and things get real easy for a while. You can forget your whole family’s crammed under a generator with nothing but red dirt to sleep on, no food but the minimum colony rations the Brethren doles out for God’s divine favor. Hell, even those bits got traded off more often than not. Then a good portion didn’t even make it to us because of the Gatos. Freakin’ thugs. It was too bad we couldn’t eat spent power cells. We were drowning in those. But hey, made tinkering with electronics easy enough. Lot’s to break down there.”

I leaned forward on my elbows. “Life’s hard at the bottom.”

He twitched and nodded. “You develop certain habits down there, you know? Just to get by. Thing is, I’ve been thinking, we’re a live target for the enemy. Day or night cycle, the Razor could snuff us out of existence without hardly a warning. I could even be on the shitter, señor, pinchin’ a loaf and blam, dead. Do not pass go. No hot dog dance for you, esse .”

“Nothing to worry about yet.” I grinned. “How long you been clean, César?”

“Clean? What? Me?” He peered over his shoulder and back. “I, eh, never done nothing. I eh…”

“I won’t tell anyone, least of all the Captain. Just tell me.”

César rubbed his shoulder and pushed his tray aside. He let out a long breath. “Fine. Since about two weeks after I got on board. Six months, four days, five hours. Fentanyl. I’ve wanted to be clean for years, even went to medhab a couple times, but it’s hard to detox when you got all that shit rollin’ around in your head. I still remember those men screaming as mother… well… aye yai, she had to get her fix too. I can’t blame her for that. But damn, man, this ship’s as squeaky clean as a microprocessor factory. Don’t you ever think about it? Not the drugs, but… I mean, we could be dead any day now. Just dead, finito , end of line, screen goes black. Makes you wanna take a little break from reality sometimes.”

My heart went out to him. He was afraid; most of us were. César wasn’t the first guy I’d seen get itchy under pressure, especially in the deep. And what do any of us do when we get scared? We revert to our childhood coping mechanisms. César’s weren’t the best, sure, but certainly weren’t the worst. At least he wasn’t a violent bully.

I’d had my own run-ins with controlled substances, but for the most part, their need in our society’s underworld had diminished greatly over the past sixty years. Marijuana had been fully legalized forty years ago, MDMA ten years later (for therapeutic use mostly), psilocybin mushrooms could be easily purchased at most markets grown local from prints, and even cocaine had been allowed in carefully measured doses as part of stim packs; though none of these things were permitted on a warship, not even alcohol. We lived in a damn dry county.

But crystal methamphetamine had remained outside the realm of safe and legal along with heroin, krocodil, spice, and prescription pain pills without scripts. You wouldn’t get thrown in jail for possessing any of these things, we were past that as a culture, but if you tried to sell them, so help you God, you were screwed. In the colonies we didn’t have huge prisons, since legal procedures were pretty thorough, but humane treatment of the incarcerated had been left back on Earth. No one aspired to live their life in prison, since it often lasted only about a year. It was a hard motivator, and so most violence happened out of sight. Any offense large enough to get you landed behind bars was almost always a death sentence.

“César,” I said, hardening my voice. “I need you at a hundred percent. Got that?”

“I am, señor David, don’t worry.”

“Look, ramp up your PT and go see Doc. It’ll help. Be honest with him, you have nothing to fear. He’s probably got something that won’t mess you up but’ll curb that phantom jonesing. That’s an order.”

César nodded, fingers scratching the back of his neck. “Si, señor.”

“Very good.”

There was a pause as he looked up towards the Maintenance Core, our ceiling, a look of consternation taking hold of his face. He was focused on something, the wheels nervously spinning inside his vibrating brain. His lips began to move, sticking together as he mouthed rhythmic words.

“Why that song?” he murmured, becoming distant. “You never…”

“You ok?”

“Hmm? What? I’m fine. I’m fine. Just thought I heard someone singing.” He pulled the tray close again and started eating, this time more voracious. “Yeah, so, can I ask you a question?” He swallowed and wiped the food from his mouth. “ Que pena. It may be personal.”

I narrowed my eyes. Something about his tone made me uneasy. I wasn’t going to like what he was asking.

“Depends on what it is.” I found my heart thundering against my ribcage.

Another bite of spaghetti flavored mush went into his gullet. “Why do we do this? I mean, the war. I know they say it’s because the Axis bombed Ceres and those two mines on Mars, but I don’t know, that just feels like caca. Like the Oil Wars. But I mean, seriously, what started this for real?”

“Oh.” I paused, considering what to say. “That’s a damn good question.”

A boot heel clapped against the floor behind me. “And one I bet not even you, smart as you are, have got the answer for.” My gaze swung around to see Liberty towering over me. She could certainly lay on the intimidation, and if I was being completely honest, I’d have to admit I liked it.

César set down his fork. “I hear it’s because of alien artifacts, Lieutenant.”

Liberty didn’t twitch, didn’t budge, and for some reason I felt smug in the moment. I leaned back in my chair, its front legs coming off the ground, and smiled up at her. “I hear it’s because some stupid people with weapons got the wrong idea when investing their hard earned time into lies. That sort of thing can really ruin folks.”

My assistant’s eyebrows furrowed.

“And you’d be wrong,” Liberty said, ignoring César. “Didn’t they teach you in school it’s best to get all your facts together before coming to a conclusion? No one should fire their weapons until they know who the enemy is.”