2 days after falling asleep at the Witches Hat

  Canine closed his journal and began his careful process of stowing it away. He reset the pyrotechnic trap built and tweaked to be as safe as a controlled burn inside a spaceship could be. Certainly safer than his selfish, risky journaling, but Maria had been right. It did help, and he was not ready to deprive himself of it.

  Done with his daily routine, he turned to the black leather satchel, its folds and creases had worn down to dull grey lines and fissures. The sight of its hand-stitched seams stitched a pang in Canine's heart. He placed it on the desk with practiced care and began undoing the outer straps of brown, old, twined rope-like laces. That done, he sighed before lifting the main flap of the bag and exposing the inner vacuum-sealed pockets. Solemnly, he removed three items. A small pouch, he debated opening to inspect the two broken wooden pieces within. He decided to leave it closed and return it to his left breast pocket. He made a note to put it there every morning, like other everyday items, subconsciously touching his hip pocket to check that his wallet was where it was supposed to be.

  The second item was light but felt heavier than the black leather bag in Canine's hands. From a special long-distance travel case, he unpacked a paper scroll no taller than his outstretched hand. He resisted the urge to unroll it, not yet. The two sticks pressed tightly together poked out twice as long as the scroll, attached at opposite ends of the paper. Canine held the names of the fallen with ritualistic ceremonial care for no one but himself. The last thing he removed was a plastic box with a matt black reflectionless finish. He could still feel the fake grooves of the wooden pattern he had tried to cover up. The vessel wasn't important, but what was inside. He removed the securing bands before lifting the hinged lid. He inspected its contents. None of the smoke jars, scroll holder, or scented balms had been damaged or dislodged during travel. Reverently, Canine returned the scroll to its rightful place, trying to give himself grace for not doing this days ago. He reminded himself that this mattered to no one but him. Not even the dead wanted to hold the obligation over him. If he had done this sooner, the nightmares might not have gotten so bad. No, that was wishful thinking, and he knew it. The nightmares had only piled onto the fear, regret, and self-loathing that made going to pay respects so hard. Canine turned off the light in his room and made his way to one of the ship's chapels.

  He ignored the service automaton goat slipping out to follow him, as it was supposed to, but not always what he allowed it to do. Certainly, he didn't want it going to the bar with him and Sara. He blushed, a tint of anger and embarrassment, thinking about the first night he went with Dribble and Sara to the bar. The horror of getting the best sleep in weeks while in public hadn't made him ashamed to go with them to the Witches Hat again yesterday. He made sure not to make the mistake of relaxing too much so that he didn't doze off again. He smiled, wondering if time with Dribble and Sara was worth the risk of embarrassment. They always had been, hadn't they? Canine tried to erase the fear and hesitance towards Sara and Dribble, but struggled with one glaring flaw.

  “Won't be the same without Pyre,” He mumbled, his hand tightened around the black box. He checked the time on his wrist comm. 25:59, almost an hour before the start of the 4th and last quarter of the 36-hour day, he still had time before the drill. The first of four drills will be conducted over the next few days. He had to be fair to the people who had sleep shifts during today's drill by doing another drill for everyone else's sleep shift. Canine couldn't help but smile sadistically. These drills were nothing compared to what the Flight Academy was like. This was the best way to integrate Grimoire’s 70% new crew complement and prepare for the worst-case scenarios. Canine prayed for the best, uncrossing his fingers just as he walked into the starboard chapel.

  Grimoire, starboard Chapel, Executive Officer Jean Simons

  Jean opened her eyes to see the boy who had disturbed her quite. He was allowed to, of course, but she wasn't used to visitors in the chapel around this time. Exactly why she chose to visit now. Jean suppressed a smile as she regarded the new HDF flight defender pass her. He dipped his head to her out of respect before he carried on to the front of the room. Jean shifted in the metal pews, grateful for the padding that had been added years ago. She still remembered the days when this room was just another random room with no purpose, no life. Oh, how this beautiful ship had grown over the last 50 years, or was it 60 years on Grimoire now? Jean smiled, forgetting her prayerful contemplation, but not her age.

  The sound of rustling paper drew her attention to the front. On the multi-purpose, all-faiths altar, the boy had set up two silvery stands on which he set the small scroll staves so that they stood open for him to read. Jean watched him produce a short, thick-walled jar, then a coin-sized metal object. The boy unscrewed the coin-sized container and rubbed a finger into it. At first, Jean thought it was lip balm, but the boy simply rubbed his fingers across his wrists. The smell of aromatic mint or something wafted over to her. The boy fiddled with the larger, clear jar, but he paused to look over his shoulder. He leaned back on one hand to face her while still cross-legged so that his dark blue eyes returned her gaze.

  “Do you care if I burn this smoke jar?” he asked.

  “Do you read signs? Canine Jerik was it?” Jean countered, and the boy's expression twitched into confused frustration.

  “I’m agnostic, Ma’am, not shamanic. Err, sorry, Captain told me not to, sir and ma’am, mizz?” The boy said. His eyes widened in recognition. The familiar look of a crewman who just realized they were talking to the executive officer of HFS Grimoire. Jean didn't usually find amusement in a panicked face, but with the boy, or young man, she allowed her lip to curl in amusement despite her internal chastisement of her tendency to see every twenty-something as boys still. She pointed over her shoulder at the sign she meant. His interpretation of her question as her asking if he was a mystic had only helped to stretch her smile.

  Still squinting, he looked past her as she directed. His mouth moved silently, but she was still able to read his lips as he read.

  “No smoking. No vapor. No unattended religious items.” Canine mothed silently as he read.

  “If you walk straight when exiting the chapel, there's another sign on the left wall that details how you are expected to dispose of the smoke from your smoke jar.” Jean directed like a mother would instruct a child on where a slice of leftover cake was. Canine responded with a less than cocky, but more-than-confident toothy smile. His largest teeth slanted at an uncommon but natural angle that punctuated his grin with two pointed teeth. A smile with teeth for any human was enough to scare some species of alien, but to Jean, his smile radiated enduring friendliness like dogs of Far Gone Earth. Shame that likely made his life more difficult outside of human-to-human interaction.

  “Ma’am, uh, I mean XO. I meant, are you okay with a flame? Would the fire make you uncomfortable? I don't need the smoke jar, but it feels right when I use…” Canine's face paled, concerned like he expected a rebuke from her. Jean didn't feel a need for one this time. If anything, she respected him for asking her about a common human fear.

  “You may call me Ma’am or simply Jean. I live comfortably with my old age and earned enough tenure as a civilian bridge officer to enjoy the occasional yes, or no, Ma’am.” Jean smiled broadly, a gesture almost as rare as the boy's genetics that made his teeth prominent. He smiled one last time before turning to fiddle with the smoke jar’s ignition switches. She could hear the sound of a small motor to pump in oxygen without letting out the smoke from the flame that danced within.

  An agnostic boy with a list of names? Jean mused. At least she thought that his scroll was a list of names. Her eyes were still as good as the day she was born, but it didn't matter if she could read the lettering from where she sat at the back. It wasn't her business. Besides, Canine might have already shared a secret of his trade. She had never met a Flight Defender whose inspiration for their callsign was so easily discernible. She was sure his name had to have part of its origins from his friendly wolfish smile.

  HFS Grimoire, starboard Chapel, Canine

  It used to take Canine twenty minutes to work his way through the list. Today, he would cut it short to squeeze it into thirty minutes. Each name wasn't required reading like a rewards ceremony or an expedient roll call. Instead, there was a tangible weight to each name that dragged on him, forcing him to take more time than it took for him to speak each syllable of every dead. The Chirp man that knits the seams of the black his bag. The Thraug tanner that dyed the black leather, the human couple that made the dumplings at their stall. And The Roost scrolled in vengeful, bitter lines for the ones he never knew personally.

  His friends, comrades, hapless bystanders, both living and dead. None of them could persuade him to let go of the chains he bound to himself. This little self-practice of his was exactly why he tried remembering them like this, on his terms, not his dreams or wide-awake visions of the past. He felt like only he could be the one to struggle to escape the past, as if every day he were teasing sore, raw wrists to escape metal bindings. But he would never be able to let the dead go like this.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He glanced at the smoke jar, its candle burning in the vacuum within. Its top had risen to make room for the building smoke that the flame burped with every molecule of oxygen, and the pump slowly dripped. He didn't need to read the sign down the hall to know exactly where he would submit the jar for its contents to be expelled into space. Better that way, both for the life support systems and the symbolism of the smoke in relation to the dead. The flame danced in his peripheral as he neared the last few names, the fake name for the real men of the KTF ranger unit. Their final moments he was burdened to remember. There would never exist written documentation, no posthumous awards, no retellings. Rangers didn't exist, not even the ones he served with. Canine was thankful that Pyre wasn't like the Rangers, Brian's story would be told one day soon. He prayed to a god he still wasn't convinced could hear him all the way from Earth's ruined solar system. If he or they or whatever ever even existed in the first place.

  Dowsing the flame of the smoke jar, Canine packed everything back into the little black box. Standing to leave, he saw the XO with her eyes closed. Before he passed her, she startled him with a few quick words.

  “The drill you are planning to do today. I assigned Selena to your team. Lean on her harder than you might normally. She has the makings of a good officer, and there are lessons to be gleaned even from the drill team's corner.” She said, not once opening her eyes to give him a final glance.

  “Uh, yes ma’am, I can try.” He said with no idea how he would try, but he would find a way. There was no expressing his misgivings towards Grimoire’s XO’s request, which to him was as good as an order. As he left, the goat fell in step behind him, thankfully having waited outside the religiously significant room. It would not have been a fun conversation piece if the XO had seen it.

  A short elevator ride, a fast walk, and an argument with a door about his access card not having the right clearances yet, Canine finally made it into the planning room. Admittedly, it was just a normal conference, much like the one on the HDF Bread Basket he had fallen asleep right before he boarded HFS Grimoire. The long square table was different, and so were the temporary additions of crystalline computers, multitude of monitors, and a link up to the ship's redundant Sound Powered Telephone lines. Someone was still putting wall panels back from their recent installation, couldn't risk setting it up until the last minute or letting maintenance do it for them. It would have risked the room being discordant before the drill. Although it would be a sort of cheating and counterproductive for a ship's crew to end a drill early by exploiting the knowledge of where the exercise orchestras were, Canine would be impressed if someone were to cheat that way. In exercise like today, a lesson he had learned early on and internalized was that there was no such thing as a fair fight. If your attacker was coming from the front, move where the front is. If the guy with a knife is bigger than you, shoot them. If you were outnumbered, make the enemy feel like they were the ones outnumbered, or shoot to wound so that they have to divert others to tend and move them. Or.

  The freshly cleaned citrus smell of the room he was walking into clashed violently with the contradictory sensations of a crisp memory of sweaty matted hair, the sound of his labored breathing through his captive's nose. Canine's hand felt the slimy coolness of the man's teeth, contrasted with his sweaty, unkept beard around his lips. The conflicting odors of the conference room he was still in warred with a smell of burnt plastic and shit-stained ammonia. Feeling of warmth from the blood and piss soaking through Canine's outfit, courtesy of the struggling man's leg, he still pinned a knife in. Cold, pragmatic emotions washed over Canine stampede into his countless times from survival and motivation to kill them first, or die. Canine had counted in sync with the pulse he could feel through the knife buried in the man's leg. Maybe that had been his imagination, but it still felt like he had felt the metronome of life ticking away.

  Canine eyes refocused on the present, letting the reliving die into a memory, letting it run away from like a dog escaping its leash. When the ideal moment had come, Canine had kicked the bleeding man from the third story of a dilapidated house. Precious few minutes of the mans life spent on the perfectly timed distraction. The mercenary's comrade crying in panicked agony as he swung upside down 8 feet off the ground, no one probably cared or thought it was intentional that the rope made a tourniquet the leg.

  Canine's jarringly vivid memory, or what he recently learned, was referred to properly as flashbacks, had come and gone in the span of a single step into the room. He mentally patted himself on the back. It was getting easier to handle those. He shook the last vestiges of the out-of-place sensations of warm fluid and grimy clothes, but found himself reminiscing too much. The rope he had bound the man with had been intentionally placed like that, but he could not remember if it was out of mercy to increase the man's chances of living or simply to prolong that man’s screaming before he bled out. A colder side of Canine that had grown since then thought that the real mercy would have been to have killed the man outright, but that wouldn't have resulted in Canine’s own survival. Let alone success.

  Canine refocused as he sat down in front of an unattended computer. What had he been thinking before that flashback? That's right, if someone on Grimoire followed the new sound-powered phone line, it would be cheating, but he would find a way to reward anyone who cheated like that today.

  “Something wrong?” asked a woman in a perfectly fit, ship suit with not a crease or wrinkle anywhere whom he recognized as Selena.

  “Why do you ask? Did you forget something?” Canine replied with a measured amount of sarcasm to antagonize her. If the XO wanted him to lean on her, he wanted to probe her reaction before he actually tried to be rough with her.

  “You had an odd look when you walked in, and you nearly tripped on that goat robot,” Selena said, either unfazed or generally concerned too much to have noticed or cared about his sarcasm.

  “Oh no, I was just thinking of something, and it was just rubbing up against my leg. It does that a lot, rubbing against my leg, I mean.” To illustrate his point, he lifted his leg from underneath the desk to show off the tiny baby goat robot that had attached itself in a comforting manner. Selena and a few onlookers who noticed reacted as if it were cute. Well, he would agree he was mildly annoyed that it was still held onto his leg. Although now that Selena mentioned it, he did have to admit it did help when it recognized he was having a flashback so quickly and helped anchor him like it was supposed to by rubbing up against his leg.

  Pulling the goat off his leg, he looked around the room, choosing a spot directly behind him where he sat at the end of the table. Lifting the goat upside down, it bawled and bleated happily as if it were a game of airplane. Regardless of its playfulness, it took the hint and attached itself to the roof of the conference room.

  “I'm working, stay there, be quiet, don't move.” Canine said.

  “meeeeehhh,” the goat bleated.

  “Yes, I said don't move twice, now that's thrice. If you don't behave, not only will I go back to leaving you in the room again, but the next time I leave you there, I'll put your charger and you in a tied-up bag.” He threatened, but he and the goat knew he would never dare.

  “Mehh,” the damn goat stuck its tongue out at him.

  “Are you able to actually talk to it?” He hadn't seen who asked.

  “No, I just pretend I can and respond to whatever I want to pretend it says. Now–” He snapped his fingers. “Focus like it's not there.” He ordered, and everybody refocused on their task. Except for Selena. He realized that they were both each other's tasks. If he remembered correctly, she was coordinating everything on the Grimoire to do with the drill. Not even Captain Abrams and Jean had any knowledge of what theft was cooking up. In a very weird way, Selena was like his very own XO, but the thought of Canine as a captain made him shudder.

  He handed the black box that contained the scroll and miscellaneous prayer objects to the goat. It grabbed it with its mouth and a few articulating cables hidden underneath its legs. With an unusual amount of respect and reverence for its usual chaotic self, it gingerly tucked it between its belly and the ceiling for safekeeping.

  Canine checked the time. 22 minutes left, but they didn't have to start at the exact time it was scheduled. Even so, he was cutting its close. An idea popped into his head. One that might kill two birds with one stone. It certainly would put a lot more pressure on Selena, but not too much. If she could pull it off in time, it would be the perfect tone setter for the rest of the drills he was going to run the ship through.

  He beckoned her closer and laid out the details of his plan. Her clarifying questions were short, concise, and to the point, wasting no time at all.

  “Okay, I'll have operation Roomba organized in 15 minutes,” Selena said. Canine raised an eyebrow. The scheduled drill is in 20 minutes. If she could show that she could accurately guess how long it would take her and the resources and staff to set this up, that would be impressive.

  “Operation Roomba?” He asked..

  “Yes, all you military types like to put nicknames to everything, right?” Selena said her face was hidden behind a computer as she worked.

  “The fleet of humanity doesn't have a military.” Canine grinned, purposely looking at the wall right next to where the door was, directly behind Selena. Provocatively he scratched his nose with his middle finger. Selena, still focused on her screen, shook her head.

  “Semantics. We don't have to worry about politically correct language here.” Selena admonished.

  “I think that's still true. Klem, I did ask you to join us so you could observe, but don't stand next to the damn doorway, my guy.” Canine said, still scratching himself with his middle finger. Selena paled, and the noise of typing and busy work softened a little as the room took full notice of Jacket Klem. A member of the order of Keepers dedicated to truth, the recording of events, facts, and crime, among other things. Jacket Klem nodded with what passed for a smile for an alien Chirp. As Jacket Klem took a seat, his neon blue metal nanite jacket flowed into his outstretched hand to form a box. The room looked on in raptured by the little spinning lever on the side of the box, Jacket Klem whistled in the beautiful way a familiar tune of Pop Goes the Weasel. Like a hinged lid, the box opened, an imitation of a spring popping out with a human hand, its middle finger clearly raised in Canine's direction. The absurdity of the exchange cut the tension in the room, a few laughs and hesitant chuckles before people began to refocus on work.

  “Please don't mind me, focus like it and I am not there.” He winked, the goat stuck its tongue again at Canine. However, if anybody in the room struggled to ignore the galactic peacekeeper and the goat ceiling fixture, it was Selena. Impressively, despite that, it took her exactly 15 minutes to set up operation Roomba.