Rabbit Cages, this time from 10/6/2010 (Patreon)

This is just depressing. I wonder if I did this for a creative writing class. After I graduated and took random classes to get a raise at work, I had a professor who once told me that I should make all my characters white unless there was a reason to make them another ethnicity, and I retaliated by making every single story I wrote full of every ethnicity under the sun. But this... why did I write this? The zombie bunnies was happier.

-------------------------

"Once more into the dark!" Jal Abbasi said, coming up and slapping Hessa on the back before giving her a friendly shoulder-shove as they both headed into the belly of the military transport. Hessa didn't know the reference, but she could tell when Jal was quoting one of his beloved books.

     "The ship isn't ever dark."

     "Not if you're doing your job, but then maybe the day will come when you'll let the Jabir break and we'll be out there in space, the dark sliding in between the cracks in the ship..." Jal sounded weirdly poetic about the thought of dying in space, and Hessa gave him a withering look. Spacers knew that you just didn't talk like that before a mission. But then again, for all his years in space, Jal still wasn't much of a spacer.

     "The Jabir will be flying long after you have retired to raise children and goats on some border planet." Hessa dropped the box of supplies she'd found on station in front of the quartermaster and watched as he just proceeded to ignore her. With his eyes narrowed, Koss stared at a screen and poked at it angrily with a stylus. Quartermaster Koss' rudeness was as much a part of his personality as flirting was part of Jal, so she didn't take offense.

     As a woman who worked with some of the most dangerous and most deadly equipment in the military, she'd had others put far more effort into offending her. 

     Before the war and before she'd decided to join the service, Hessa had worked the farm, learning machines by being the only one who could fix them for both her family and their neighbors.  After her father's quiet competence and soft-spoken strength, Koss had seemed unbearably rude and unhappy, but he treated everyone with the same rudeness. 

     Jal looked at Koss and then wiggled his eyebrows before jerking his head in the quartermaster's direction, making it very clear that he found Koss amusing.  Clearly Koss seemed unbearably rude and unhappy, even by those who hadn't known her father. Hessa had started to think he liked being that way. Instead of getting frustrated, she turned to back to the counter and just waited.

     "You want to raise those children and goats with me?" Jal leaned a little closer, just enough to be inappropriate.  His dark eyes flashed with amusement, and she gave him the most contemptuous look she could muster given that he did amuse her.

     "Raise your children?" Hessa pretended to think about that for a minute. "Let me work the math. We've set down on seven different worlds since you joined. On each world, I estimate you had at least four women who you wrote your poems for. Well, except on Zanjan where I know you had at least eight. And you were in the service, for what... three years before joining the Jabir?" Hessa nodded thoughtfully as she considered his offer. "Since we're near the frontlines, the medicine goes for the injured, not to birth control, and your understanding of the verses is a little..." she pretended to consider her word choice, "shaky when it comes to the rules about how a man and a woman should act before marriage.  So exactly how many children are you asking me to raise?"

     "Women's tongues are as sharp as two-edged swords, and wound as much." Jal held his hand over his chest.  Then he was laughing. "You just give me the word, and all my poetry will be for you. My beautiful words and your beautiful math would make beautiful babies," he suggested. Even lazy Koss roused himself long enough to make a disgusted sound.

     "Does that line ever work on women?" Hessa asked, amused despite herself. Her father would have called the man disgraceful and then walked away, refusing to spend his time on someone like Jal. The war had changed her, though.  After the darkness of this war, Jal's irreverence made her smile when very little else could.  They fought against farmers whose ignorance fueled the battles that stripped planet after planet of good men and women and left ruined fields and twisted ships behind.

     Jal walked backwards, clutching his chest as though wounded.  He stopped at the hatch up to third deck where the prisoners of war were secured for the voyage to Astana. "I always offer women whatever it is they most want," he said with an irreverent wink, and then he was gone before Hessa could argue.

     "Lock the door to your bunk with that one around." Koss pulled the box of parts across the counter and plucked the receipt off the top before laying the parts out over the counter to log them in.

     "He tries to break through a woman's common sense, not her door." Hessa leaned against the counter and waited for him to finish so she could take the supplies down to deck one engineering. She was an officer in the League of Planets and the chief engineer of the Jabir, the youngest in the League to ever earn that distinction. She certainly did not want to end up scratching the dirt of a half-terraformed planet on some border planet that was always on the verge of rebellion.

     Koss grunted as he poked the supply computer and muttered about the excessive costs of the parts and the way the war was making his life and his budget miserable.

     Three days out, and the crew was restless. Hessa found herself sitting in the cramped engine room, her feet braced on the masun struts as she read the data burst from home. It kept her out of the way of the captain who had decided that this quiet run far from the front lines was the perfect time to clean and polish every surface on the ship that could be reached without a space suit.

     Her little brother was getting married, and her mother lamented that neither she nor their older brother would be attending. Saadat was still at Takhar and passage to and from that sector was more dangerous than the fight itself. Her father complained of the new family next door who allowed their goats to dirty the communal stream and had refused to help put a new roof on the mosque.  Her little sister had received honors in biology and had declined an offer for the service. It was good someone was staying home with her parents growing older.

     Sometimes Hessa did think that she wanted to go home and raise goats and children. Their farm was established, the terraforming complete years ago.  She could have a quiet life. But for all his pretty requests, Jal would never fit in on that world where what you did mattered so much more than the words you could weave from the air. He'd be lost. And her parents... well, they wouldn't think much of him with his gunner-soft hands that had never handled anything rougher than a targeting computer or a pen.

     Even lost in her thoughts, Hessa felt the unusual vibrations in the masun strut. Dropping the burst pad to the floor, she headed immediately for the control panels. Green lights gleamed in the steel board, displays clicked off their numbers: normal speed, moderate hull pressure, all compartments pressurized. Flicking through the secondary command functions, she searched for something to explain what her bare feet could feel in the shuddering metal.

     The explosion blasted her off her feet and slammed her back into the bulkhead, her back bending to match the curve of the ship before she collapsed to the cold deck nearly unconscious. Dimly she could hear the wail of the siren, and she waited for someone to switch it off, for the captain's voice to come on and offer a quick report or to demand injury reports. She waited for the door to hiss open or for the harsh grate of metal against metal as the med team forced it open to check for injured. Instead, the siren continued, the sound warbling as either the speaker or Hessa's hearing began to fail.

     Breathing deep hurt, so she breathed shallowly and distracted herself by counting off the number of parts in a transom engine shock absorber. As soon as her crew rescued her, she'd call the duty officer from med and tell him to check the transom shock absorber first. Shit, where were they? The pain in her back crawled into her arm, making her hand tingle and throb.  Hessa began to earnestly pray that they would hurry. She was an engineer. If she had nerve damage, she needed medical attention now.

     The siren cut off, and Hessa gratefully waited for the captain's voice or maybe the duty officer with instructions. Instead the room was silent. Even the steady thrump of the Jabir's engines was silent and the air hung heavy with the smell of twisted metal.  Hessa's mind slipped to the Fars shipyards with miles of ships and ship parts being reduced into hot metal or being rebuilt from it.  Those dead ships filled with the stench of parts being torn from their steel bodies smelled like this.

     Silence.

     Painfully, Hessa pushed herself up on her one good elbow, and that movement alone made the world shimmer and pale as her body registered hot pain everywhere. She tasted blood. Ignoring the pain and fear, she pulled herself one elbow-length at a time along the floor to the edge of the strut.  She'd hoped to see the door on the other side glowing red from the heat of a plasma torch as the med team tried to punch through the hatch. Gray metal and gray bolts and the cold floor greeted her.

     Hessa collapsed to the floor and tried to stay calm. As chief engineer, they wouldn't leave her for long. They couldn't. She struggled to silence her fears, and that was when she noticed a new sound that invaded her world. Closing her eyes, Hessa tried to deny the obvious, but she was the engineer; she knew the sound well enough. The vents were weakly hissing air into her small prison, which meant that somewhere air was leaking out again and the ship's computer was trying to adjust for the loss of atmosphere.

     Warm tears dripped from Hessa to the cold deck, and she wasn't sure if it was frustration or fear or just the physical pain of her body that had finally made her cry. As a child she'd cried a few times, but she had learned stoic silence at her father's knee. Well, she'd learned to be too stubborn to die at his knee as well, she told herself firmly.

     When she pushed herself half upright again, she screamed as her back ground painfully. Ribs or maybe a shoulder blade were broken, Hessa wasn't sure which. Basic training said to lie still and try to not puncture any internal organs in this situation, but with the room leaking air, Hessa was more worried about punctured metal than a punctured lung. She idly wondered which death would kill her faster before she shoved that thought to the side and focused on the job.

     She needed to get to the controls. Slowly, she slid forward, the solid floor as treacherous as the ice of the pond back home, although this time she couldn't blame fatigue for her aching knees and trembling legs.  She hadn't been skating for hours, chasing Saadat across the glittering surface. She finally reached her goal and clung to the safety hold at the edge of the panel as she coughed out the blood that filled her lungs. It was bright red across the shining steel. Always before, the blood Hessa had seen, on soldiers and rebels alike, had been brownish rust, but this was vivid as it splattered across the floor and panel.

     Her body ached and throbbed in places, one leg had gone numb and her right shoulder was a mass of fire, but she forced herself to focus on the displays.

     The green lights of earlier were now as red as Hessa's blood.  The board flashed a dozen priority messages across the command panel, and Hessa's brain stalled as she tried to understand a truth so huge that for a second, she refused to believe it. Her numbers, her precious machines and computers must be lying. They must.

     But in the end, Hessa had to believe. Deck one was almost entirely gone. Science, medlab, captain's quarters, bridge—all gone, and the gaping hole had bent and twisted the Jabir until her seams were bleeding air. Jal's words had chased them into the dark.  She triggered the emergency beacon, but it would be days before another transport would pass this way and find them floating, silent and dark against the black of space.

     No one would be coming for her. If that hatch did come open, Hessa would face the black of space, and maybe she would panic about that later. Maybe later she would find her fallen burst pad with her family's letters and feel something, but right now numbers and probabilities filled her mind. Her fingers tingled and then started feeling hot as she brushed them over the controls.

     Deck two was damaged, but repairable. She could imagine the crew in their quarters swarming to the cracks and applying patches as fast as they could. From the numbers that flashed in front of her, she knew they would lose a lot of oxygen before they could repair that much damage.

     Deck three was damaged as well, but not as badly. The prisoners would be desperate, and they were most likely to have been hurt in the explosions since they didn't have the soft padded walls of the living quarters. Unlike the guards or the crew, they were helpless, mostly desperate farmers and low-level criminals who'd turned to the rebellion and its politics of hate and despair. They'd be screaming in their cells as the guards, who were trapped with them, struggled to get patches on the damaged seams.

     Quickly running the numbers through the computer, Hessa knew the real horror of her situation, and she ran the numbers again as she tried to deny another truth too ugly to face. She quickly eliminated her own haven from the figures and reworked them assuming that desperate crew would work much faster to fix the damage than they ever had in drills. The numbers still flashed reality in cold black digits floating in a crystal display. There just wasn't enough oxygen for both decks.

     Closing her eyes, Hessa gave a desperate sob, and the pain flared in her back. There had to be a regulation for this, and she should know it. It was probably on one of the tests she had studied so hard for, but her mind couldn't remember it. What would the captain have done? Hessa suddenly couldn't even remember the captain's face, and her imagination slipped away like an agile fish that slipped from the hook. She couldn't imagine the captain ever existing at all, and that might be evidence of brain damage, Hessa considered as she coughed again, spraying the display and ruining her perfect numbers with angry ovals and smears of red. Her right hand was hot and hanging useless.

     Without her permission, her mind turned to her father. She remembered when she'd been eight.  The night the storm shield failed and the bitter winds of Lorestan's angry winter had come screaming off the deeply carved canals just west of their farm. She'd huddled under all the covers in a corner of the kitchen with her younger brother.  Her mother made incoherent noises as she hurried from one window to another, checked the fire, and watched the door with worried eyes.  All three of them waited for her father and older brother to come in from the barns.

     Her father had appeared with the goats, herding them into the room even as the open door immediately froze all the warmth out of the house. Her brother was right behind with the cow, and that fat, slick-haired lady had bellowed as her brother forced her through the too-small door into the kitchen to huddle in the room with the rest of them.

     It was funny, but she didn't remember the stench, even though by morning it must have smelled horrible. She didn't remember her mother falling asleep even though when she woke up, her mother was on the floor, her arm draped over her father's stomach as they lay between the Hessa and the door. Mostly, what she remembered were the rabbits.

     Because she'd woken before the rest of them, she'd wandered out to the farm, the blue sky just tinged pink from the dust still in the air, but the shields again in place. In the barn, she'd found them... brown and grey and white bunnies with noses still pink, each huddled in a corner of his individual cage, many pressed to the mesh to try and share heat with the rabbit in the next cage. Some had limbs twisted in impossible shapes. Her father found her with her favorite cradled in her lap. His one floppy ear had broken off in the fierce cold. Her father had crouched in front of her, his deep brown eyes offering solace, and his enormous calloused hand reaching out to stroke the dead rabbit's fur.  He'd carried her and her rabbit into the house.

     Hessa reached out, her still-functional arm aching as she fingered the dials and levers to divert the remaining oxygen.

     Her older brother had been tasked with either bringing the rabbits to the house or moving them to the sheltered cellar. "Always take care of those who depend on you first, worry about yourself once you have lived up to your obligations," her father had said in that hushed, angry voice he so rarely used. Saadat had ducked his head and blushed with shame.

     Hessa didn't even remember what excuse he'd given. She forced the recalcitrant lever to the third deck position and locked it into place through a series of switches, clicking them to the right one after the other. Above her, the vent that had been weakly hissing oxygen into the engine room fell silent. Closing her eyes, Hessa pushed away thoughts of Koss and the captain, of Lea who worked the kitchens and burned every other dish and Jal. Jal's smile lingered a little longer than the others, but in the end, Hessa sank into the darkness and all she could think was that her fingers felt soft, as though she could feel warm fur below them.