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Into the Black [missedstations & Bathos]

'Not at all,' Remarque said, a little too quickly.

'Of course she is fucking special, I designed her. She is the best ship in her class,' he said, with the hints of pride. He wanted to talk about his ship. That was not quite the reason why Zachary wanted him dead, but he could let that slide. Those things were complicated.

'I mean, the IPA stealth ships minimise engine emissions to what most sensors can't detect. The Requiem has no emissions at all. Engine efficiency is perfect. She is not the fastest of ships, and that is a shame, I am sure if I had the resources to redesign her I would be able to make her faster. She was just a prototype, but now that I know such engine structure functions, I would be able to-'

He cut himself off abruptly. He was just telling his rapist about what he wanted to do with lots of pieces of metal? Obviously he was going insane. When did he suddenly become conversational all of a sudden? Being surrounded by people who loathed him was getting to him, he supposed. He was beginning to want to justify himself, as if their opinion actually mattered.

He got up from the co-pilots chair and went for the door before he could dig himself into a bigger hole. He was almost getting the urge to tell Vince why he joined the army in the first place.
 
Vince's face revealed no emotion as he listened to Remarque go on, noting for the first time something stirring behind his dead silver eyes. He was proud of his ship, thought of her lovingly, like a child or a dearly cherished pet. The concept was not foreign to Vince, not in the least, but it was jarring in its own way, coming from Remarque.

Remarque stopped himself abruptly, but it was too late to conceal his enthusiasm, and Vince watched with an expression of mild curiosity as the other man pushed out of his chair without bothering with an explanation, and headed out of the cockpit. Something soured in his belly, an uncomfortable blend of guilt and sympathy and pity, and he cleared his throat softly, shifted minutely in his seat.

When Remarque was at the door, against his better judgment and all his instincts for self-preservation, he murmured loudly enough for the other to hear, "I look forward to meeting her."
 
Remarque flinched at those words and stopped. 'You can't be. You know what I did there.'

While Remarque knew that what he did then was right, that he had no other choice, and that he would do the same thing if he was in the same situation again, if history replayed itself, he knew that someone like Vince probably would never understand nor approve. He had killed every single member of the crew, and destroyed their attackers. It was a massacre, and he could not deny it. He had no regrets, but he knew exactly what he had done. He had not closed his eyes when the ship ran through the commands he gave it, and afterwards he had walked through the corpses.

'It's funny. You are going to murder for revenge, and I... I only ever killed when it was necessary. Why am I the criminal?' One death or a thousand, it was all the same. He had never felt any different since the first time he killed. And that was a thought he had often had, but never voiced. The victors decided who was right, in the end. Heroes were those who ended up on the right side. 'If I had served the IPA I would have been called a hero, whatever it was I did.'
 
Vince didn't shift positions where he sat, and with Remarque behind him there was no way he could have seen the tightening of his expression, the clenching of his jaw, or the way the skin around his eyes grew taut and strained. Remarque hadn't told him anything new; he was aware of his own minor hypocrisy, but he considered it just that--minor.

"Funny," Vince parroted, a blend there of incredulous and bitter. "Lucky for me, Lang's death just happens to be necessary, too." And that wasn't an exaggeration at all, because Vince was lucky that Maria and Remarque needed the man dead, too. He would find him faster and with far fewer snags with their help. But he couldn't lie, not to himself or Remarque, and say that he gave two shits whether anybody else wanted Zachary Lang dead.

"I wouldn't kill an innocent man," he went on, "and therein lies the difference. Hell, I wouldn't even kill a guilty man, as long as he didn't threaten me or my own. But Lang? Lang did. And I don't know what kinda place you come from, what your people taught you about family and honor, but mine had pretty clear rules about it." Vince heard the angry tremor in his own voice and paused to clear his throat.

"When I found my brother, I had to identify him by the ring he wore. HIs face was gone, just a bloody mess of teeth and flesh. Couldn't see his eyeballs through the swelling and the bruising. He never hurt anyone, not in the name of the war, not in anger, not for nothin'. He was. He was a sweet kid, brainy like you, and just good. And Lang tore him apart, left him to die. But he didn't die, not until I got to him. I didn't know, he was so still. And then he breathed, sorta. It was this ... gurgle. He couldn't have talked, probably not ever again, even if he did make it. He was blind, broken, and all alone, and he didn't know his own brother was right there beside him when he kicked it. So yeah, I'm going to murder Zachary Lang for fucking revenge, and anyone who gets in my way can share his fate. If you want to insinuate that it makes me a bad person, go right on ahead. Fallin' on deaf ears, kid."
 
'No one on a battlefield is innocent,' Remarque replied. 'But my opinions on that do not really matter. It's just that... Don't ever think you're any better than me, or Maria, or even Zachary. If you killed me, would I have been a stain on your conscience? I don't think so. Is what you did to me on your conscience at all? Those I killed, I killed because I preferred not to die.'

Remarque was no idealist, but he knew that staining your hands once was the same as doing it a thousand times. Sure, you can wash off the blood, but you still remember. He just couldn't keep silent on this.

'You know about Jack.' A statement of fact. 'You know what was done to him. The man who interrogated him, I killed. I injected him with a radioactive isotope. Long, painful death, you know. I enjoyed watching him die. But afterwards? The universe was still the same. No balance was changed. One human less. What is that when you consider the bigger picture? It hasn't turned the time back. And you find that the monster you've been hunting was the monster in your head, and you can't kill that one. You might sleep well for a night or two, but really, soon enough, you feel just the same, except maybe it's worse because you have no reason to keep going. You'll find that the hell you're living in... You can't leave.'

Even Remarque was a little chilled by the description, and he knew what Zachary was capable of. It didn't surprise him, but he would rather not have known. 'By all means, kill him. Just don't expect to feel better, and don't ever think think you're better than me. If you're not a bad person, what are you? A good one? Don't make me laugh.'
 
"I don't need any lectures from you," Vince bit out. Remarque found the idea of Vince as a good person funny, and maybe he was right about that. Vince could be a right bastard when he wanted to be, but the thing that kept him going, the thing that separated him from the others, was that most of the time he didn't want to be. He wasn't wired to enjoy suffering. There just happened to be occasions when he did, when he felt compelled to give back to the universe the anguish it had dealt him.

It didn't make him a bad person, Vince maintained. It made him human, a little off balance, and maybe kind of sick. But not bad, not at the heart of him. He still believed in protecting the weak and eradicating evil, corrupt men. He just went about it differently. That was all.

"I have plenty to live for," Vince said. "I got a home. I'm going back there as soon as this whole mess is over. Shit happened, but it didn't take the fight out of me. Not like you. I'll be damned if I ever stop fighting. Now get out of here and let me do my job."
 
'So you judge me in such simplistic terms but not yourself?' Remarque snorted. Some people were really unbelievable. Remarque knew there was no such thing as good or evil, that every situation can be viewed from a thousand angles. He supposed now that Vince had as much conscience as he did, just that he was unwilling to consider any other point of view. Only to be expected. Vince had, after all, lived through less.

He was just as human as Vince, with a few more scars, with a tougher exterior and far less illusions. War was so good at demonstrating the value of human life and one's own nature. Remarque knew himself well.

'Not like me...?' he repeated. 'This is my home,' he said, motioning at the screens. 'I was born between the stars. Where else could I go? I tried so many times to settle down, but I never could.' When grounded on planets he always yearned for the vacuum, restless and irritable. It was only in the progress of travel that he could feel at peace. In every port he just counted down his leaving.

'I survive. Maybe one day I will find a reason to live again. See, I have hope.' Remarque sounded almost surprised at himself. 'In your words, shit happened. It taught me to pick my battles better.' And it had taught him that to accept and to endure was easier than fighting every little thing that came his way. The best revenge was to be the last one standing. He almost felt like provoking Vince in this moment.
 
"I said beat it," Vince grumbled, and still he didn't turn around. "No use in us buttin' heads here. We gotta put up with one another, don't mean we gotta share our life stories."

He didn't want to hear about how Remarque had tried to settle down, or what happened to his former lover, or his hopes and dreams for the future. He wanted Remarque to remain purely one-dimensional, an ugly little mark on his day, easily forgotten and put from his mind. Remarque was making that difficult, by revealing that he wasn't as empty as he behaved.

"Please," Vince said, after a long pause, remembering now that Remarque had demanded he ask nicely. "Please, go away and leave me alone unless it's a matter of life or death."
 
'Fine, fine,' Remarque replied and finally left. He was being asked nicely, after all. He spent the next few hours with the engines, tinkering to see what was the fastest speed. It turned out that it was just a tiny bit more than he had thought, so he cut a couple of hours from their journey. Not much, but enough. Remarque could not wait to get off the Dioscuri: he felt distinctly unwelcome.

Like Remarque thought, James and Maria stayed in bed most of the time and kept out of the way. It was probably James who did his best to keep her there, because he knew that she would probably rub up the crew and Vince the wrong way. The only time any of them saw anyone else was at terse mealtimes. For some reason, Remarque still spent as little as possible in the engine room. It was irrational, and it irked him, but he could not make himself spend time in there, even though he was starting to like Pablo's company. He wondered what Pablo would think of their mission. Murder, mayhem, and regime change. (Well, Remarque was beginning to consider that one.)

He had estimated their flight path correctly. As soon as the ship stopped, he was at the cockpit, examining the sensory readouts from the back of Rosemary's chair. They were surrounded by massive rocks, ice and debris left over from the battles. There had once been a planet there, Remarque knew, but this was all that was left. Utterly destroyed, the pieces had melded into the asteroid belt.

Now, nothing had been there for years, and it was a little surprising how little the relative positions of everything changed. Newton's third law. Without a force to oppose it, the Requiem would probably remain in exactly the same orbit for millenia.

'That should be the Requiem,' he said, pointing. 'It's the right shape...' What has pointing at was a little off to the side of the main belt, far away enough to avoid most of the biggest rocks. The smaller ones would make little impact though the thick ice shell.

'Move closer, then transmit this code towards it,' he instructed, offering a tiny disk. He had prepared it on their journey, slowly remembering every single keystroke. It was a strange one. He had never really thought that he would undo what he had done.
 
Twelve hours on the nose after they left planetside, Rosemary turned up in the cockpit to find Vince still there, reclined as if he hadn't moved an inch from the spot he'd been in when Remarque had taken his leave. His ankles were crossed on the console, his head was pillowed in his hands, and he was staring out at the space ahead of them. She folded herself into the seat next to him.

"You know, you don't actually have to spend the entire shift at the helm, Vince," she said, needlessly, because Vince knew that better than she did.

"Yeah," he said. "I grabbed a bite earlier."

Rosemary nodded. "You all right?"

Vince ignored her question and countered with one of his own. "Is this it for you, Rosie? Space, the hunt, work?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, do you think you'll ever settle down?"

Rosemary got quiet then, too, and it was just the two of them, the way it used to be years ago, staring out the view screen with the gears turning hard in their heads and whisper quiet in the engine. Vince was a different animal then, but then so had Rosemary been. They'd both gone a little softer around the edges over time, and they both sat thinking about what they'd do if that trend continued and there came a day when space was no longer able to serve as the faithful crutch she'd always been.

"Damn, Vince," she said, after a long silence had passed between them. "Way to pull out the heavy shit."

"Yeah," Vince said, getting to his feet. "I'm gonna get some shut eye."
- - - - -

It was Rosemary's watch when the Dioscuri finally reached its destination, but Vince had been keeping an eye out. When the ship slowed, an alarm beeped in his quarters, but he'd already felt the change in velocity deep in his bones and so he switched it off, already dressed, and made his way to the cockpit.

Remarque was there, and so was Rosemary, doing something Vince didn't quite understand with a small disk. "What's going on?" he asked, coming to a stop behind Rosemary's chair and resting his palms on the back of it. "What are you doing?"

"Transmitting a code," Rosemary told him, but her fingers had stilled on the console. "If that's all right?"

Vince glanced sideways at Remarque, very briefly, and then nodded. "I guess, if it's necessary. What's it for?"
 
'Several things. First, to wake her internal systems up. Second, to disable her external defences so we don't get blown up. Third: so the cargo bay opens and we can actually have access,' Remarque replied, as emotionlessly as he could. He sounded a tiny bit breathless even so: his ship was just across a tiny stretch of space, beautiful and still, the same as she had been the day she was made and the day he had left her. The Requiem, the soundless song for the dead, and a secret graveyard. It didn't bother him at all.

'Don't worry, you won't see any of the mess I left. The ship would have cleaned itself up,' he said as if someone had asked. Vince must have wondered if the ship was still populated by corpses. But no. The Requiem's internal maintenance systems were built to take care of any waste and to reuse it elsewhere in the ship. So the dead were still there, but without a trace. They were now the part of the ship they had lived, fought, served on. Remarque had told the Requiem to clean everything except his room. There would be no trace that anyone ever set foot on her.

'The ship, at the moment, has no life support,' he informed them. 'Someone will need to go inside and activate the systems internally, and then it will take the ship a few hours to heat and pressurise. The engines, I am afraid, will need to be...' It was hard to explain to a bunch of people who had not studied his subject. 'Synchronised.' It was the best word he could think of. 'I do not know how long that will take,' he admitted.
 
Vince pressed his mouth down into a hard line and studied the view screen before him. He then look at Rosemary, who was awaiting his go-ahead, and then Remarque.

"I suppose it's necessary," he said, but wasn't happy about it. He hadn't expected any delays and his fingers already itched to wrap around Lang's throat. Rosemary took this response as permission and her fingers went back to work across the console. Momentarily, the Dioscuri had sent off the transmission and Rosemary was leaning back in her seat.

"All right," Vince said, "My watch now." He swapped places with Rosemary and made himself comfortable. "All right, Remarque, how long until we at least know somethin'?"
 
The block of ice before them began to crack almost immediately, breaking under the force of the Requiem's hull stress tests. The Requiem was made purely for space: she did not have the capacity to either land on planets or to leave atmospheres, but it was only now that she was waking up that she appeared as the tiniest blip on Dioscuri's sensors. Remarque could smirk. He was good. How proud he was to see that his daughter was so fine, even after being left all alone and neglected.

Remarque could see that Vince was impatient, but he knew that taking the Requiem was wiser. She could get them close enough, and her firepower would take the IPA by surprise. While she was listed as missing, such ships were generally assumed destroyed.

'Not long,' Remarque replied. 'I suppose I need to borrow a suit, and go deactivate the traps I left... Wouldn't be funny if I did you all in like my last crew by accident.' He had just made a joke at his rapist. Damn, he really was losing it. But it really wouldn't be funny if the Requiem killed any of them, because they only had enough to cover the minimal crew requirements anyway. So he supposed that the Dioscuri's crew could feel safe for now. He didn't really fancy leaving himself stranded in the middle of the Black. The Requiem had no shuttles left. The romance of a lone hermit going insane on his ship did not quite appeal to him.

'See, she's waking up. The engine activity means that she is running automatic stabilisation. Means that none of us will die of radiation poisoning if we board in half an hour or so.'

The Requiem had been a prototype: and for that, she was not a particularly safe ship. Remarque had been stationed there to refine and improve his design. His involvement in the war if considered in that way, had been rather accidental. It wasn't his fault that they found that he was so damn good at it.
 
"Traps?" Vince echoed incredulously, eyebrows up. Every time Remarque opened his mouth, seemed like there was something else potentially fatal and nerve-wracking to ignore politely as he twiddled this thumbs and let more and more of his authority over his own life slip through his fingers and into the hands of murderers.

That he was not getting more worked up over this revelation was something to be examined at a later time. For now, he was damned well going to get Remarque his suit.

"Scratch that, Rosie," he said, getting to his feet. "I"ll be escorting Remarque to the airlock."

If Vince said that bit with a certain quality of glee, then he could hardly be held responsible, or accused of rudeness, for that matter. He couldn't help it that out the airlock was exactly where he'd been wanting to push Remarque for days.

Not that Remarque likely needed an escort. He'd had enough time on the ship to find his own way around, but--

"Finding a suit to fit you might be tough. Bet you could squeeze into Roesmary's, though."
 
'You think I was going to leave my ship floating in the middle of space with no protection?' Remarque asked equally incredulously. 'You are lucky my memory is perfect: someone lesser might have forgotten a password or two.'

'Aw, you only want to escort me to the airlock? Why not come with me?' Remarque thought it would be quite entertaining to scare the shit out of Vince, but that would probably not be the greatest of ideas. After all, if they were unable to work together Remarque was more fucked than the bounty hunter...

He wouldn't mind being pushed out of the airlock at all at this stage of the proceedings, provided that he had enough oxygen to make it to the Requiem. Considering how many corpses she had consumed, she should be well stocked. He could feel a deep pull in his heart for her dark corridors and her cold engine room. His old clothes would probably still be in his old room, with the photographs of... Heh. Funny the places his mind was drawn to, in the end. Before he met Jack, he had been certain that he was incapable of loving any human being.

Well, he probably could fit into Rosemary's suit, and he did manage it. If he wasn't still underweight, he wouldn't have... It wasn't a surprise that he had rather been lacking in appetite on the Dioscuri.
 
Vince didn't follow Remarque into the airlock chamber. He remained just on the outside of it, standing amongst the suits and the helmets. He watched Remarque through the open doorway, his finger poised on the button that would close Remarque in and reveal him to the coldness of space.

He considered pushing the button early. It was only for a moment and Vince dismissed the idea immediately as foolish, but it did cross his mind.

"You should find everything you'll need in here," he said. "If you get lost or confused, if something strikes you over the head and you get turned around for even a moment, if you run into trouble or are injured, if you see another ship approaching or you experience anything out of the ordinary, there is a red switch on your pack. If you reach back with your right hand, you can feel it. Flip that switch and your mini thrusters will bring you back here or as close as they can get you."

Vince was used to people ignoring his orders when it came to their safety. His tone was hard, but his face was resigned. Nobody ever panicked and hit the red button. They panicked and maneuvered themselves into the ship's engine and turned themselves into ground beef.

"All right, you're all set. You got a few hours on that tank. Start back when you're down to twenty or you're gonna run out." Vince hit the button.
 
Remarque didn't listen to Vince's advice more because he was space-born than because he was not paying attention to his safety. He had taken his first spacewalk when he was able to fit into the smallest suit on his mother's ship. It was hard to remember the times before his modifications – time then could only be measured imprecisely, and 'natural' memories were so inadequate. He finished doing up his suit on autopilot, checking the exactly how much air was left. A few hours turned out to be four – not enough, but he could resupply at the Requiem.

“I'm sure you'd be heartbroken if I asphyxiated,” he informed Vince by the intercom.

And he was out. Twenty long, long minutes and he was on the Requiem. The hold doors were opening as by his years' old instructions, and she was beginning to melt the ice. In a few hours, the ship would be free to move, if not quite habitable. It was a three hour trip to the control room, including the time to enter all the correct passwords.

“If I don't contact you in the next four hours, I fucked up, and I'm dead. I won't be able to talk to you until I get to the control room.” As soon as he got into the ship's corridors, all signal would be dead. He was sure that none of Vince's crew would be sad if he never contacted them again... Death by own ship, it would be wonderfully ironic, he had to admit.

Without any further ado, he keyed in the code for the first door and stepped through. Funny, his last memory was of this corridor was it covered in corpses. Black floors, black walls, lit only by red floor lights. It really had never been a ship made for people. It was a ship made on the plans of someone who had never considered anything except metal and wire, programming and circuitry.

The Requiem had always been light on the life support. The whole ship was a series of locks, pressurising only when they sensed approach. Most of the corridors were dead unless they sensed approach of crew. The suit told him that ship temperature was only a few degrees above outside space – a surprise. The Requiem was already waking. A readout on one of the walls told him that the weapons system was the first to come online, and that the shields and defences were coming into place.

Inside the suit he was breathing hard. In the end, it felt so wrong to be back here. It was his little mass grave after all. All those dead, converted into base materials for ship maintenance. No wonder the ship was better stocked than he had left it. He had to hurry though, he was wasting air and the ship wasn't going to switch on life support by itself. Depressing, and so empty. He had thought that coming here would be better, a relief, a homecoming? But he suddenly realised that this wasn't his home either. He didn't have the time to mourn.

More codes, and slowly the corridors were lighting up as more power began to run through the ship. He was getting tired, too. Not clever, not eating. He was finding that he did not really have the energy. Remarque never would admit how close he was to the limit when he got to the control room. There were a few terrifying moments in between telling the ship to pressurise the room and the suit dying. He got the helmet off in time only for the cold to hit his lungs.

Remarque did not know how long he knelt gasping. Lucky him. Not quite at the temperature where his lungs would have frozen and shattered, but it was damn close. Why was he coming so close to death for a ship he was finding he didn't quite want anymore? He hadn't realised how sentimental he was.

“Remarque calling the Dioscuri, all fine, you can dock when you like,” he sent over. Four and a half hours – he must have fainted.

He did not know if the air or his disappointment was colder.
 
"Vince, he's probably gone. You know that, right?"

Over twenty minutes had passed since Remarque's check-in time and no contact. Rosemary waited as long as she could stand, watching Vince watching the communication system, scarcely blinking. Vince's knee was bouncing anxiously and the fingers of his left hand tapped a sloppy cadence on the armrest.

"He can't be," Vince said.

Rosemary gave a start. "Vince? Do you actually care what--"

"Of course not. There's also no way I'm rid of him this easy. The kid bleeds trouble."

Remarque calling the Dioscuri, all fine, you can dock when you like.

Vince's shoulders relaxed first. Then he smirked. "Told ya." Then he pressed a button and transmitted to Remarque, "'Bout time, poky. What'd you do? Pull over for a snack?"

Even as Vince was snarking at Remarque, he motioned for Rosemary to begin docking procedures. Without waiting for a response from Remarque, he went on, "We're on our way. Don't forget to unlock the front door."
 
“So turns out that when I calculated this thing, I slightly overestimated my physical capabilities...” he told Vince lightly. If he ever got out of this fucking mess, he was going to start training again, and he would regain some of the weight that he had lost. Eating would be clever, though it seemed that he had got out of habit.

“Hold doors will be fully open in roughly forty seconds...” he said, reading off a display. The control room was perfect in his memory. Dull black panels were sliding back to show screens detailing every single aspect of the ship's functioning. Only things that were not covered in error readouts were the weapons and defence systems, and ship maintenance. The engines were out of whack, as he'd predicted, the navigation system would have to be reset entirely, and he had encrypted all the ships data banks. Temperatures within the ship were only as high as to cause no damage to the systems.

“Ah, fuck. I will not be able to pressurise the hold for you, not enough oxygen for the entire ship. You might need to make the trip into the Requiem proper by suit. Working on the rest of the ship now...” And then, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to ask someone who still wants to kill you, “Can I have Pablo in the engine room as soon as possible?”

While he was talking, he was also telling the ship to remove pockets of poisonous gases, to warm habitable areas and properly oxygenate them, to unlock major corridors, especially the path to the engines. The radiation was gone after all these years.

“Navigation system is screwed. Would it be presumptuous of me to think that Rosemary would like to sort that to her specifications?”

He was all business now. It was good to have a clear purpose: fix ship, travel to central worlds, kill a few people, disappear. It really didn't matter who hated him – what mattered, what always mattered, was how well he could get the job done.
 
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