Ends, Means, Laws, chapter 23 (Patreon)

“You hurried over here,” John said with amusement in his voice.

“Yeah, well you’ve never pissed off Amali. It’s not safe.” 

John frowned. “What exactly is the command structure in your group? Should we have her over here to discuss strategies for working together?”

Tyce looked around the room. It was half the size of the engineering room, but it had no controls at all. That left a lot more open space.  “What is this room?”

“The guys are split between an office or storage room.”

A long conduit the ran the length of the wall, and Tyce put his hand on it. It was warm. “Yeah well you guys thought a hallway was a prison cell. So…” Tyce ran his hands over the back of the wall, searching for any hidden doors.

“In their defense, that's a dumb design for a hallway.” John leaned against the wall near the door and crossed his arms. That was classic annoyed John. “So, are you going to ignore my question about the leadership of your ship?”

Tyce focused most of his attention on the walls. “We’re not a military ship. Leadership works differently with a family.”

“Don’t give me that shit,” John snapped. “I’ve seen the intel on your ship, on what your ship has been involved in. I know you’re military. Don’t fucking lie.”

Slowly turning around, Tyce studied John. “I never said we weren’t involved in military action. We were. But the Dragon was a family ship, so it’s not about promotions and ranks.”

“But you’re the captain?” John’s voice had a real edge of challenge. Good. Tyce would rather have this version of John, the genuine anger and hot passion. He understood this John better than the emotionally stunted version he’d dealt with earlier.

“I’m the captain,” Tyce agreed. “And for the most part, that means that I get the tie breaking vote if Ama and Tuch get into a knock-down, drag-out fight about how to handle a situation. It also means that if someone has to make a fast decision, that’s me. However, Ama lived on the Dragon for fifty years. She’s known half the crew since they were born. No title will ever trump the relationship she has with people on that ship. It’s a family, John. You remember what that’s like.”

John’s expression turned nasty. “I remember what you were like. You would have done anything to make your father happy, and then he died without every once telling you he was proud of you. I know how much that screwed you up in the head. I was there.”

Tyce turned his back. He’d never fought for his father’s approval the way John had. It had been John getting drunk every time a test came back with anything less than an A. Tyce’s father had never been that much of a hardass. Sure, they had trouble understanding each other, especially after Tyce’s mom had passed, but Tyce’s dad had never played the psychological games of John’s father. However, Tyce wasn’t willing to discuss this. Not now. They had too much water under this bridge, and Tyce would rather focus on the homicidal aliens and crazy ship. 

Tyce frowned. Maybe it was because he’d been contemplating a potential life sentence lately, but a new thought occurred to him. “What if this is a prison ship?” He turned around.

The question seemed to startle John out of his anger. “What?”

“This ship. All the things that don’t make sense. Maybe this is a prison ship. In the lower decks the quarters are cramped and the doors are locked. We couldn't move upship without breaking each lock. If the prisoners were confined down below, that makes sense.” Now that Tyce had said it aloud it made even more sense. “If prisoners were brought up using the spiral staircase, the room where I was held could have been a security measure. Prisoners could go back down to the prison but they couldn't get into the upper part of the ship with the guards.”

The grimace on John’s face suggested he didn’t like the idea. “If that's true, I'm going to call these aliens pretty damn sadistic because one slip on those stairs and their prisoners would all fall to their deaths. That’s a damn dangerous situation.”

“It may have been an intentional design feature. That would minimize any chance of the prisoners storming the doors in some mass mutiny.” And if the prisoners tried, they’d all end up dead—problem solved in a decidedly sadistic way.

“But I've never seen guard quarters like we have up here,” John argued. “They’re huge.”

“Their culture could value guards.”

“Or the ship had the alien version of lawyers and judges on it.” John shook his head. “Or we don’t know because neither of us is trained to interpret alien motives based on cultural artifacts, and we are no Liam Munsons able to bound entire alien civilizations in a single leap.”

That was a tangled knot of cultural references, but John had a point. Sometimes slow and cautious was best when figuring out a mystery, but Tyce was willing to bet this had been a prison ship. He fell silent. They both stood staring at each other. As much as Tyce wanted to find some safe conversation, he didn’t know where to start. John knew why Tyce had turned against his people, and no forgiveness was coming. He had no idea where to go from here.

John broke eye contact and walked the perimeter of the room, his fingers trailing over the designs on the wall. He paused. “Thank you for saving Plat.”

“I wouldn't let a man die.”

John grimaced.

The expression was like a knife to Tyce's gut. He poked a finger in John’s direction. “Don't even make that face. You know me well enough to know I'm not a monster.”

“I thought so, but then the breakthrough at Landing happened. Now I'm trying to figure out which is the real you. Are you Tyce who talked about ending the war quickly before more people died, the Tyce who played decoy to save two injured soldiers, or are you the Tyce who prolonged this war and shot his own men?”

This was hell. Tyce had died and this was his punishment for fucking up his life. And clearly Ama and the fucker who had given Tyce his tattoo were all morons. He rubbed a hand over his face. “Are we going to have this fight again? I am the same in me in every single version of the truth. I don't like to see innocent lives lost and I went into service in order to prevent that. I left the service to prevent that.” Tyce stopped before he started yelling. 

“So you thought shooting your guys was a better solution than reporting them?”

Tyce threw his hands in the air. “I am not going through this again. I told you, I did report them. Multiple times.” John was the singularly most annoying human being in the fucking universe. He had met sand gnats that annoyed him less than John.

“But you never went up the chain of command; you never went outside the chain of command.” John had such an earnest tone, and Tyce wanted to punch him in the face.

“What exactly should I have done?”

“You should have done exactly what I did! I screamed to everyone who would listen that something was wrong. I talked to newspaper reporters, soc vid stars, anyone. Hell, conspiracy websites still carry my interviews. I told everyone who would stop and listen for more than three seconds that you never would have turned traitor. I suggested the video footage was faked and the rebels were trying to use this is a publicity ploy. I suggested you'd been captured and forced to act in the vid. I appeared on morning television, on talk shows, anyplace I could get in front of a camera. I suggested all sorts of insane things because I refused to believe that you would turn against your own people.”

Tyce knew the lengths Command would go to in order to preserve their image as good guys. His stomach churned at the idea of John putting himself in the line of fire, and that did explain why the dead commander had poisoned the crew against John. “What the hell were you thinking?” Tyce didn’t mean to lower his voice, but horror made the words come out in a whisper.

“I knew you, and I knew you wouldn't do this.” John ran a hand over his face. “Fuck. I can’t even be in the same room with you without losing every bit of self-control. What the hell are we going to do?”

Tyce stared at John. For the first time, he imagined the world John had lived in—believing in Tyce and screaming it from the rooftops while everyone backed away. Even if they believed John was loyal to Command, they wouldn’t have wanted to be near that sort of rhetoric. The courts might have given lower ranking soldiers freedom to speak out against the government, but that didn’t mean Command couldn’t retaliate in subtle ways. It would have left John alone. Isolated. 

When Tyce had made his choice, he had expected to die, and when Ama took his prisoner instead, he had expected a short trial and execution. However, he’d found a cantankerous and difficult family. But if John was telling the truth, he had made himself a pariah. “What did you do to yourself?”

“I didn’t throw myself on Ribelian mercy and get brainwashed,” John said with some derision. 

Tyce leaned against the wall. “Ama didn’t brainwash me. I admitted everything—every mission where I failed to stop my men from killing and raping. I described every person they unlawfully executed. I thought it would make her angry enough to kill her quickly.” Tyce sighed. “Clearly I was an idiot who did not understand how Ribelians thought.” A rebel from another breakaway planet probably would have pulled the trigger. But Ribelians… they were odd. “But you had to know that people wouldn’t forgive me, so why would you throw yourself into the fire?”

“Because you’re my best friend,” John said miserably.

“John.” Tyce stopped, not sure what to say to that.

“And I’m an idiot,” John added.

“Yeah, but I have to put up with you because I’m your best friend,” Tyce teased.

“You were,” John said. “We lived together for over four years. I assumed you already knew that.”

“You didn’t say we were best friends,” Tyce said. “You said we are best friends.”

Another grimace crossed John’s face, but he didn’t disagree. 

“Which is good because you are my best friend, even if your crew is full of idiot.”

John scoffed. “Not full, just mostly full. And several of the worst idiots took off for parts unknown so now I have a higher percentage of inexperienced and worthless to actual idiots.”

“Good to know.” Tyce sighed. “How did you end up a sub-commander?” That was the one part of the story that didn’t make sense. If John had made that much noise, Command should have left him a lieutenant and dumped him on Landing or Monroe or Paititi. The thought of John dying in an assault Tyce had planned turned his stomach.

“They would've preferred to get rid of me,” John said with a darkness in his voice that suggested he had a story or two behind that comment. “But I was the most vocal critic of the war, and that meant a lot of newscasters were watching me. They couldn't dump me in a prison cell, because I hadn't technically broken the law and line officers have a constitution right to free speech. But ranking officers don’t. So they did the next best thing to getting rid of me. They promoted me into silence.”

John crossed his arms. “Don't give me that look. I knew I was tanking my career even as I did it, but the man who saved Plat, the man who took on an Imshee alone? That man deserved to have someone fighting for him and no one else was stepping up.”

John had too damn much loyalty, especially when Tyce hadn’t kept in touch after getting his first assignment. “I didn't expect anyone to step up. I made my choice and I knew with the consequences. When the breakaway planets lost the war, I knew I'd end up in an Earth prison.” Tyce hadn’t expected John to arrest him, but the universe did like shitting on his head. “But like you said, I'm the sort of man who would do that to give other people cover.”

“Like that stupid plan of yours to economically strip Rebello.”

“My plans are often dangerous and sometimes impetuous, but they're never stupid. It will work,” Tyce said firmly. A war of economic attrition was the only kind Ribello could win, and if the other breakaway planets joined, it would work quickly. Tyce just wasn’t sure the others had the will to follow through. It would mean a lot of years of deprivation, but Ama had sent around a bunch of Thomas Paine’s writings from before the birth of the United States. He’d been a persuasive author, and if Ribelian beliefs about reincarnation and duty didn’t get through, maybe a centuries-dead philosopher could.

John shook his head. “And you were just going to be the martyr they threw on the fire. If you couldn’t find a base out here, you were going to have your ship head back to Earth space and surrender you, weren’t you?”

Tyce shrugged. He hadn’t expected John to figure that out, but that had been plan A. They would gather intel on this part of space and sell the intel and Tyce to Command in return for a right of free passage for the Dragon. If they found a safe world that didn’t require heavy terraforming, then they would work to make a new Ribello. But that was a dream more than a plan.

“You idiot.” John punched him in the arm.

“Hey! If Earth controlled all the colonized planets, I wouldn’t be able to run for long anyway. I was maximizing benefits.”

“Your so-called family should have stopped you.”

“Yeah, well Ribelians don’t see the world the way we do.” Joahan in all his helpfulness had offered to kill Tyce so he could start over in a new life without Command chasing him. That had emotionally scarred him, but sadly Joahan had been trying to help. Yoss hadn’t even bothered. When Tyce was hurt that a friend didn’t offer to kill him, he had been hanging out with Ribelians far too long.

“They’re strange,” John said. At least that was one step down from calling them murderous terrorists, although a few could be that as well. “So, what are we going to do about the Imshee?”

“It would help if we could figure out their strategy.” They attacked one at a time even when there were several who had boarded the ship, reacted to close-contact like unthinking animals, and fled when they had the superior weaponry. If Ribelians were weird, Imshee were bizarre and inexplicable.  

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Does it feel like they've earned forgiveness from each other--like it's time to rebuild. If not, be honest. I don't want them building until it feels secure and healthy for them to build something together.