It’s a well-known though closely guarded fact that troop loyalty & morale depend on timely delivery of holiday meals. Here is an inside glimpse of how this vital task gets accomplished. For readers of Leonard Richardson’s subversive, widely acclaimed Situation Normal, this story unfolds after the battle of Mas’pl, in which the Fist of Joy summarily rendered the Outreach fleet impotent by stealth chemistry.

* * *

We, the Unwilling

by Leonard Richardson

 

“Right off, I want you to know,” said the rre psychologist, “that you are not in any trouble.”

Spaceman Kenta Imura was in the worst trouble of his life. Everyone was looking at him but no-one wanted to be in the same room with him: he gave off fear like a gas. A couple of uhaltihaxl officers stared at him through a thick glass window in his hospital room. The rre psychologist stayed safe encased in a milky-white plastic surgical exobody.

“Oh, that’s great,” said Kenta. He tried again, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Great to hear!”

“Before we get started, these fellas—” a status light flashed on the shrink’s exobody, the equivalent of a human casting a glance at the officers behind the glass “—want to hear your version of what happened at Mas’pl.”

“I didn’t even see anything,” said Kenta.

“You experienced the battle.”

“I, uh, I was there, yes.”

“Tell us how it went down.”

“Uh, we skip in, the depot’s guarded by thirty ships. My squad’s deploying drones to kill the thirty. All of a sudden there’s gas everywhere. All throughout Enterprise. The call goes out, we’ve been hit with an Evidence weapon, but, duh, because my buddies in drone control have stopped working. The humans, I mean. They go into the Evidence hallucination, maybe they’re talking to themselves, but effectively it’s down to me and Heshlathl and Tun-Rusj in drone control.”

“But you’re all right.”

“It’s affecting me, for sure. Me and Heshlathl are feeling nauseous, and at some point he drops his rations. And even if we were feeling great, three people can’t run a whole swarm. And then—I remember this—the fire alarm goes off, and I’m thinking, why is there a fire alarm when we’re going to die? I go out in the hall to see if there’s something I can do about the fire and… there’s Niyazov, and he’s on fire, and…”

“Okay,” said the rre doctor, shifting into a voice that told Kenta he should regard being interrupted here as a form of mercy. Thon dropped a 3-image into Kenta’s terminal: a cauliflower lit up around the edges.

“Spaceman Imura, this is a brain scan taken during your induction physical two years ago.” Kenta looked at his own brain like it was being served up to him at a fancy restaurant. “In this scan you were told to think about your home town. Instead, you apparently spent the duration of the scan thinking about non-reproductive sex.”

“I didn’t think anyone would ever look at the scan, aer.”

“The point is moot,” said the shrink, “because in the comparison scan taken one hour ago, you were also thinking about non-reproductive sex. This lets us do a fair comparison.”

A second cauliflower was dropped onto Kenta’s plate. The brains pulsed shamefully in unison. You could tell what they were thinking about. “It’s normal to think about sex,” said Kenta. “For humans.”

“We see no change in your brain’s internal models as a result of the attack. No unexplained new memories, no personality changes, no shift in opinions. Have you ever taken Evidence as a recreational drug, spaceman?”

“No, aer.”

“And you haven’t suddenly turned pacifist, have you? No reservations about military service?”

“No, aer.” No new reservations, anyway.

“So as far as we can tell, the enemy’s weapon just didn’t affect you.”

“I guess so, aer.”

“Do you know what this means, Imura?”

“I’m very fortunate, aer?”

“We think you have a physiological immunity. You could be the key to winning this war.”

“Me, aer?”

“Think about it.” The two uhalti officers were conferring behind the glass. “Evidence is the Fist of Joy’s only real weapon, and you survived it. They can’t touch you. That proves this isn’t a magic super-weapon, it’s just chemistry. If we can understand how your body processes Evidence, we can inoculate our troops against it.” The exobody smacked two of its ten surgical manipulators together with a force that could crush a brick. “The Fist will crumble.”

“Yessaer, crumble, aer,” said Kenta.

“We would like to send you,” said the shrink, “on an instrumented mission into a portion of Outreach space currently occupied by the enemy. You’ll be undercover, but it’s no more dangerous than any other combat mission. Are you up for this?”

“Yessaer,” said Kenta.

“I will discharge you from the hospital and Lieutenant Stharbud will brief you.” Something about Kenta’s worried face made the rre want to deploy a little nugget of cliché. “And don’t sweat it, son. You’ll be back by Thanksgiving.”

The rre doctor ratcheted thons exosuit into a standing position. Kenta just sat there, unable to move, amazed that…well, he was going to die, sure, but there was a chance he’d die with his shameful secret intact.

Kenta was immune to Evidence, but the explanation wasn’t physiological. It was hiding in plain sight. Evidence turned battle-hardened spacemen into cowards. It didn’t work on Kenta Imura because he was already a coward.

CPO Niyazov had been the opposite: pretty much the most gung-ho pigfucker in the service. Niyazov hated the Fist, well, everyone hates the Fist, but Niyazov made it personal. He had a big bicep tattoo which gave Kenta the creeps: a severed egenu head with mouth gaping, the eyes and the tongue cut out.

During the battle at Mas’pl, a fire alarm had gone off and Kenta had panicked. He’d run out of Enterprise drone control to see Niyazov smashing his ham-sized shoulder against a bulkhead, pulverizing an arm that was already broken and also on fire. That was how the fire had started, actually. Niyazov had fried his arm with a laser pistol, trying to burn off that horrible tattoo.

In the moment before Enterprise performed a miraculous retreat skip, right as Kenta was certain that Niyazov was the last person he’d ever see, the big Uzbek noncom had turned his head and looked at Kenta with the meek determination of a child. The fight still burned in his eyes, but the hatred was gone. Evidence had taken care of that.

Niyazov went home without ever fulfilling his dream of personally stabbing an egenu in the belly and pulling the guts out. The Navy gave him a prosthetic arm and a medical discharge. Meanwhile Kenta, the coward, was being sent right back into a combat zone with electrodes stuck to his chest. Because he didn’t have the good grace to go insane with his buddies.

Kenta was worse than a coward: he was special. That was the real reason why he had to go out and die. In this man’s Navy, special was the worst thing you could be.

* * *

“Nice ship,” said the uhaltihaxl in the leather jacket. Kenta tried to figure out if he was being sarcastic. “You the pilot?”

“Yes, sir,” said Kenta automatically.

“Not that it matters,” said the uhalti, “but if you’re the skipper, I’m the one calling you ‘sir’. Mr. Achipex, at your service.” The uhalti held out his hand for a nice inconspicuous handshake not-a-salute. He was wearing civilian clothes, but so was Kenta.

About six months ago Kenta had gotten certified to pilot cargo craft as well as drones. It was part of his long-term plan to get transferred off Enterprise and avoid ever seeing combat. Now his pilot’s certification had become a key part of the Navy’s plan to sneak him deep into Fist-occupied space. It was enough to put a guy off cowardice altogether.

Kenta shook hands with Achipex and pulled Camille’s controls into his terminal. Camille was a single-crew civilian vessel barnacled onto a cargo container the size of Kenta’s high school gymnasium. Kenta popped the cockpit hatch and winced at the dry dead stink.

“Whew, we been keeping this one in mothballs for a while,” said Achipex. He slapped a torch around one finger and stepped into the cab to check its coupling with the cargo container. Kenta followed, struggling through the protocol necessary to subordinate the ship’s piloting interface to his capital terminal.

Achipex had the slightly shaggy horns of someone who spends all his time in a cramped cockpit. Uhalti in the service either kept their horns short or let them grow out forever. Achipex was something special: a spaceman whose job required passing as a civilian.

“Where we taking this crate, skipper?” said Achipex. “They don’t tell me anything.”

“Rodondi Point system,” said Kenta. “We’ve kept the inner planets, but the Fist has the surrounding space locked down. There’s a legion of marines bottled up on IV. Colonel Kumar’s outfit. If they tried to leave, they’d get hit with Evidence.”

“We’re gonna relieve them with one little cargo container?” There was no implication that this ridiculous plan was Kenta’s fault, which raised Kenta’s suspicions even higher.

“Not exactly,” said Kenta. “We’re bringing their Thanksgiving dinner.”

“The…” Achipex stuttered. “The…the…you’re talking about the cranberry thing, skipper?”

The Outreach Navy made a lot of promises to its enlisted beings, and most of them were scaled back or forgotten when keeping them became inconvenient. In Kenta’s experience there were only two times the service would really tear things up trying to help you out.

First: they would find your body. A lot of people braver than Kenta had been killed at Mas’pl. After the war, the Navy would gather every stray carbon atom within a cubic light-year, compress all those atoms into a sphere, and display the sphere at the service cemetery on Deimos. Some planetbound dreamers wanted their ashes scattered in space; spacemen tended to want the exact opposite.

Second: Thanksgiving dinner. About once a year someone like CPO Niyazov would line up a unit like Kenta’s and inform all the humans that, subject to differences in inertial reference frames, ordinary decent people like Kenta’s folks back on New Manitoba were right about now bringing the ol’ Thanksgiving turkey out the oven. At this point you’d get yourself a nice turkey slice-up (on-planet) or a pack of premium-quality food pouches that simulated the experience (aboard ship). This tradition—that goddammit the service would give you worthless grunts something to be thankful for so as not to let you disgrace this holy day—was a sacred bond for veterans like Kenta’s father, a nice bonus for enlisteds like Kenta, and a befuddling waste of resources for absolutely everyone else in the service.

“Yes, Mr. Achipex,” said Kenta, “the cranberry thing.”

“Fucking Providence, skipper,” said Achipex, finally dropping the civilian act for the practiced tone of one who cannot believe he is once again risking his life so an officer somewhere can fill in a cell on a spreadsheet.

“It’s important.” Hearing Achipex’s scoff made Kenta want to defend Thanksgiving. “For morale.” If we couldn’t relieve the marines with a squad of commandos, we could at least drop them some turkey. A Navy that couldn’t deliver Thanksgiving dinner didn’t deserve the name.

With the skill that comes from a lifetime of subordination to Merciful Providence, it took Achipex only a couple seconds to make his peace with the madness and unfairness of the universe. “Well, let’s get going,” he said. “Pull her out and skip.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” said Kenta.

Achipex chewed this over with none of the fear he’d be feeling if Kenta had actually outranked him. “I think I’m good,” he said at last.

“We need to inspect the cargo container.”

“We don’t have time,” said Achipex.

“So the pool master should have gotten me the spacecraft earlier, yeah?” said Kenta. The assignment was on an impossible schedule, but Kenta believed it was a phony schedule designed to stress him out and flush out whatever physiological response made him immune to Evidence. After all, those marines weren’t going anywhere.

“Not my problem, mate,” said Achipex. Kenta looked through his controls for the ones that managed the cargo container. Their absence only confirmed his suspicion that he was not the highest-ranking spaceman on Camille. Achipex watched Kenta fumble around inside his own mind. “The container is sealed,” he said helpfully.

“Well, unseal it!” said Kenta. He had never been in command before, but he’d always tried to carry out orders and he had no clue why idiots like Tun-Rusj did this. Achipex didn’t respond. He sat in the co-pilot’s seat, strapped himself in and folded his arms in refusal. Like the Evidence protestors who superglued themselves to the hulls of the spacecraft they used to serve on.

Was Camille smuggling weapons to the front or something top-secret? Kenta checked the readings. There was a real container under the ship and the mass distribution was consistent with boxes of…something.

“You can skip us now, skipper,” said Achipex in a quiet tone that dared and double-dogged Kenta, “or you can bring this up to the commander on station.”

Kenta had occasionally appealed this sort of argument, and even when Kenta was a hundred percent indisputably in the right, he’d been punished for wasting an officer’s time. But you know what, there was a better way to handle this.

“All right, not a problem,” said Kenta, “we skip.” He buckled his strap and started flipping through the pre-flight checks. Unlike checking the container, you couldn’t miss those or you’d die. “Do you want music?”

Achipex groaned. “Can you put it in your terminal, sir?”

“C’mon, don’t be that way. Let’s have some music. How about snot?”

“Regs say no music or other distracting stimuli, skipper,” said Achipex.

“Regs say I inspect cargo before we undock, Mr. Achipex.”

“Snot is fine.”

Kenta smiled. “There you go.” Kenta pulled Camille away from the station to the clanging of loud, grim snot music and the drawl of a singer from the colonies high on methylated polycake.

“Clear for skip,” said Kenta. Then they were sixty light-years away in the space between star systems. Achipex unstrapped and stood up and stretched, even though he’d only been in the seat for a minute and a half. Kenta almost giggled. “Now that the commander on-station is sixty ly away,” he announced, “we will inspect the container.”

Achipex paused mid-stretch. “Give it a break, Imura. Why are you so obsessed with this container?”

“Why are you obsessed with keeping me out?” said Kenta. “The capacitor takes twenty-eight minutes to charge. I can do an inspection in ten. This is my vessel and I’m following regs, so give me the controls or I’ll break the seal manually.”

“We’re under radio silence,” said Achipex.

Kenta hated these non sequiturs, the random-hopping rationales noncoms used to justify whatever pigshit thing you had to do. “Unless we’re stowing a pulsar,” he said, “I don’t see what maintaining silence has to do with opening a cargo container.”

“I was hoping to avoid having to mention this at all,” said Achipex, “much less fifteen minutes in, but do you know why I’m on this mission?”

“I assumed you were coming along to bake the pumpkin pies,” said Kenta.

“I am here to subdue you if you make any trouble.”

“Who’s making trouble?” Kenta suddenly became very worried that Achipex was going to scrub the mission. He couldn’t let that happen; his secret would come out.

“You’re making trouble, Imura. We’re not even in occupied space and you’re deviating from the plan. I’m seeing your heart rate is going up, your cortisol levels are increasing. So I’m just going to administer—”

Kenta felt one of the electrodes jump against his chest and a feeling of wooziness swept through him. Shit! Kenta’s ETA to being face-down in the manual instrument panel was ten to thirty seconds.

“Okay, sorry, man,” said Kenta. He reinstated the vessel’s artificial gravity, but with the gravity envelope tilted ninety degrees perpendicular to the floor.

“Whaaaah!” said Achipex. He swung one arm at the seat he’d abandoned and fell down towards the airlock hatch. He’d break a leg or two, but that wasn’t good enough. Uhalti are tough bastards, and Achipex was jeopardizing the mission. Kenta opened the airlock hatch.

All the air in the vehicle blew Kenta’s hair back on its way down into space. Achipex’s scream was sucked away in the windstorm. Kenta wiggled the gravity envelope around relative to the spacecraft, trying to scrape the uhalti out through the airlock. He slumped into unconsciousness, not quite able to figure out whether the repetitive dinging sound was the tinny, distant snot music or a reminder that he hadn’t closed the hatch in time.

* * *

Kenta had intentionally bombed the Navy aptitude test, hoping for a quiet tour spent in a kitchen in the back of a space station. Dad had learned about the results, pulled some strings and gotten Kenta placed into a college-level drone pilots’ course and assigned to fucking Enterprise. The flagship, pride of the fleet, where even the door repair guys were top of their class.

Despite his accent, Kenta was neither American nor Canadian. He hailed from New Manitoba, a NAFTA colony where the only acceptable activities for men aged 20-23 were college football and its safer cousin, military service. Kenta wasn’t the athletic type, and enlisting was easier than facing down his old man, a decorated GWII vet who never showed any emotion except while standing for the service anthem during college football games. Stone-faced dad always sitting at the dinner table like a…like a…well, there was some species that didn’t normally show emotion, but Kenta was damned if he could pick them out of the ever-growing Fist of Joy lineup.

On Enterprise at Mas’pl, the moment had come. The moment for bravery, the moment to live up to Dad’s expectations. Kenta had choked. Ninety-ninth-percentile spacemen like Niyazov had been hit with Evidence and turned into conscientious objectors, taken out of the fight because Kenta was a sixtieth percentile muddlethrough on his best day.

Kenta woke up not dead on his back in the pilot seat of Camille. The gravity envelope still pulled towards the aft end of the vessel. Kenta craned his neck and looked down the well. Achipex was gone and the airlock was closed. There was a dark red smear on the wall across the hatch.

“Oh, God,” said Kenta. It was a cowardly way to kill someone, letting space do the work. Kenta shut off the gravity and unstrapped himself from the pilot’s seat. Something about this assignment was very wrong. He stripped off his shirt and peeled from shaved skin the electrodes that were still reading his vitals. The electrode that had jumped on his chest was a dummy, primed to deliver Kenta a dose of something knockout-ish on Achipex’s say-so.

Kenta’s terminal said he’d been out for three hours. The capacitor was fully charged and ready to skip again. Kenta was now the highest-ranking spaceman on Camille and the controls to the cargo container were open to him. Kenta pulled himself on handholds towards the container, and that’s where the turkey delivery mission really started to fall apart.

The container was full of pallets of food, yes, but not Thanksgiving food. An uhaltihaxl wouldn’t have noticed the difference, but on the box labels Kenta read pizza, injera, sushi, pre-scrambled eggs. Dumplings and flatbread from fifty cultures. They started serving this during basic training and didn’t let up—Thanksgiving dinner aside—until your tour was over.

Worse, the food was expired. Not recently expired, not ‘field-tested’, not ‘it’s-probably-fine’, but, like, expired years before Kenta had enlisted. Food from the previous war. This wasn’t cargo; it was ballast.

“See, this is why you inspect the container,” Kenta said to Achipex floating somewhere in space. “They loaded the wrong cargo. If you’d let me inspect the container we’d have caught it.”

Kenta couldn’t go back and he couldn’t complete the mission. Waiting for help was the same as going back. Kenta went back to the pilot’s seat to listen for enemy chatter and discovered that Camille had no radio transmitter.

There was software that gave the appearance of a working system, but an essential piece of hardware was missing. Behind the panel, nothing connected the comm relay to the computer. Kenta could receive secure transmissions but he couldn’t send anything.

That didn’t happen by accident. The pieces were falling into place. This and the expired food and the knockout electrode. Sabotage was afoot in the service. Someone had set Kenta up to fail. Maybe Achipex had been in on it, maybe he’d been blindly following orders. It didn’t really matter.

Then it hit Kenta. The perfect solution: he was still on the Evidence trip. He was lying on the floor of the drone control room on Enterprise, in a trance. Achipex wasn’t dead; that was part of the illusion. The whole story about Kenta being immune to Evidence was a ruse to get him to let his guard down when the real triggering event happened. The expired food and the missing radio followed the same non-logic as the unreadable books in a dream. Kenta’s brain was too wound up producing the hallucination to fill in anything technical.

This gave Kenta a stabbing surge of hope but it was impossible, of course. If you were inside a programmed hallucination, this was the one idea you’d never get. People in 3-films don’t see the cameras. This was real life, Achipex was really dead, and Kenta was really fucked.

Kenta paced Camille’s tiny bridge. He pulled up his mission briefing and studied the exact wording of his orders. It turned out this whole thing was only necessary because the Fist had attacked the sector quartermaster and captured over a million Thanksgiving dinners, along with other pieces of equipment such as nuclear missiles.

The missiles were the prize, of course. Nobody from the Fist could eat Earth meat. So now some black-market Fist bastard was selling premium-grade turkey back to human civilians, while Colonel Kumar’s marines waited for a culinary reprieve from hell that would never come. It made Kenta sick.

Ideas started to spark again in Kenta’s fear-numbed brain. That stolen food was out there somewhere. He brought up a map in his terminal. There was a medium-sized Outreach station, Lachia, two hundred lightyears away. It was now under Fist occupation, but no doubt business was still going on. People had to make a living, after all. If Kenta had a million packets of turkey to fence, that’s where he’d go.

Kenta’s entire experience with black markets consisted of illicit on-base beer purchases, but anything more serious than that would have to be on Lachia. It was a potential path to the success of a mission that, more and more clearly, was not going to succeed any other way. You can’t deliver cargo you don’t have.

Kenta turned his back on the dark red stain and the cargo container. He strapped himself into the pilot’s seat and ran through the pre-skip checklist again and with a thought sent Camille sixty ly in the direction of Lachia.

He wasn’t worried about Achipex. The Navy would find his body. That was guaranteed.

* * *

Kenta saw a couple of Fist ships docked at the Lachia station, but they were medium-sized freighters and pleasure craft. There was no occupying force to speak of, but he couldn’t look too closely, because without a radio there was no way for Kenta to get clearance to dock.

Kenta had planned for this. His plan rested on a calculated risk: that the Fist of Joy hadn’t outlawed brands yet. The Fist hated brands, but you couldn’t deny they kept the lights on. Kick them out of occupied space and the space would quickly be ‘occupied’ by starving terrorists.

Sure enough, by flashing his hazard lights and motivating Camille very slowly towards Lachia’s hull, Kenta was able to get close enough to engage with a brand through the low-power radio in his capital terminal. Unfortunately, the brand he picked up was Polly.

“Gee, fella, looks like you’re in a hell of a pickle,” said Polly.

Polly (or Paulie if you preferred a man) was a brand for service members on leave. It made sure you got the appropriate discounts. It was Kenta’s default brand when on a space station, and someone really should have reset his branding preferences before sending him on this undercover mission. Another snafu, another sign that something was rotten in the Navy. Now everyone with access to the disposition context knew that an Outreach spaceman was trying to dock at an occupied space station.

“Hey,” said Kenta. “Hello, Polly.” He’d been worried that the first words out of his mouth would be I killed Achipex. “Uh, I need to talk to a different brand.” This was always an awkward moment. Nothing you could say would ever hurt a brand’s feelings more, and Polly was so buddy-buddy all the time that Kenta felt bad saying it.

“Say, you don’t mean that, Kenta,” said Polly. God, my name’s in there now. “How about a brewski at the on-station Goalz Sports Bar, on me, huh? Let’s just get your ship in the shop.”

“Okay, yes, yes. I need to get my ship fixed. You can get me clearance? My radio’s busted.”

“Wouldn’t be your pal if I couldn’t get you clearance. Who’s paying for the berth?”

Kenta had never docked a civilian ship before. You had to pay just to dock? Kenta had no money, which, uh, little problem here, meant he also couldn’t afford the hundred thousand black-market turkey dinners he’d come here to buy. Still, the only way out is forward. “Can I…pay when I leave?” said Kenta.

“Need a number on record for the deposit. Can you charge it to the service?”

That was possibly the worst idea in the universe. “How much is the docking fee?”

“Six hundred thirty, plus tax.”

The Fist moved fast; they were already collecting taxes in occupied space. “I guess I need a loan.” said Kenta.

“No problem at all!” said Polly, suddenly very excited. “Let me conference in my good friend 1-2-3 Quick Loan and Wire Transfer, a Patriot Network affiliate. We’ll get you set up with a service-rate payday loan.”

Kenta began to feel a weight around his body, an awareness of the deepening web of transactional information that would let any enemy on either side determine exactly where he was just by searching a database. “Okay, while we do that,” said Kenta, “before we get carried away, I really do need to talk to another brand.”

“I’m helping you, Kenta,” said Polly. “I am here to help you. You don’t need to talk to another brand. You have me. What can another brand give you that I can’t?”

“It’s not like that, Polly,” said Kenta. “I need to talk to Raskaud Bonn.”

“Aah,” said Polly. The brand clicked her imaginary tongue in a way that would have come with a wink if the connection had been good enough to support a 3-image. “I’ll just leave the local number and you can call it yourself.”

The service had a policy of looking the other way while Polly located harmless pleasures for spacemen and marines. This courtesy probably did not extend to ‘liberated’ military gear, even turkey dinners. For that, your brand was Raskaud Bonn.

Raskaud was an import-export brand that helped small Outreach businesses trade with the Fist of Joy. Part of its branding was the suggestion that much of the “business” it arranged was not counted in either country’s GDP. Kenta knew this in the same vague way he understood that Donna Karan made higher-end women’s clothing, whereas CRS made cheaper stuff.

“Polly says you have something for me.” Raskaud Bonn’s representative on Lachia Station had a deep woman’s voice with a Bottom System accent.

“Hi, Raskaud, uh…” Brands always had to know why you hadn’t engaged before. “You know, I, uh, never really needed to…”

“Cut the soap, fella. Raskaud Bonn’s a busy brand. You buying or selling?”

“Maybe both?” said Kenta. “I need to find someone who deals with military surplus.”

“Which military?”

“Ah,” said Kenta. “I need someone who’s not too picky about that.”

“Send me a manifest with your requirements,” said Raskaud Bonn, as if Kenta had one ready. Kenta stuttered excuses until he realized he did have a manifest ready. It was the manifest of everything that should have been in his cargo container to begin with.

“This is gonna be our secret, right?” he said.

“Trust me. Brand-consumer confidentiality.” Kenta copied the manifest from Camille’s computer into his terminal and forwarded it on to the brand representative, who made a quiet sucking noise designed to tell Kenta that she was reading it.

“Go to the food court at 0315 station local,” said the brand representative at last. “Meet a hopore with a chipped beak in front of the Pret a Manger. My cut is twenty percent. Raskaud Bonn out.”

Fabulous. Whatever amount of money Kenta didn’t have, he now had to come up with twenty percent more. Still, you gotta spend money to make money. At every point along this road Kenta had taken the only possible step that could lead to the completion of his mission. Until that strategy finally failed him, there was still the chance he could pull this off.

* * *

“Pip-pip, old chap,” said the hopore with the chipped beak in heavily accented English. He drew Kenta towards him with a bodybuilder’s arm, scooping him up into his casual stroll through the station’s food court. As the hopore’s skin touched his own, Kenta felt an electrical shock.

Kenta had slouched around the food court afraid that he was walking into a sting operation, and that taser shock confirmed his worst fears, but it was just a little tingle, an electrical weapons frisk. The hopore kept walking casually, tugging Kenta along.

“So can you get me the food?” said Kenta. The hopore grunted; he didn’t actually speak English, so Kenta said it again in Trade Standard D.

“You talk to Nor,” said the hopore. Nor: an egenu name. They backtracked to the docking ring, where the hopore ushered Kenta onto a large egenu cargo ship. In a side cabin was an egenu woman sitting in a quiet jacuzzi, holding a handheld terminal beneath the water and squinting at the screen like she wanted it to drown. “This is Nor,” said the hopore, and stepped back.

“Uh, good morning, ma’am,” said Kenta in D.

“I get these part numbers I don’t recognize,” said Nor, “which is pretty interesting until I find out it’s all food. I sell equipment, okay? For food I don’t get out of bed. As you can see.”

“But, um—”

“Let me finish! Then I see the quantity you ask for. A hundred thousand meals. So congratulations, kid. You got me to care about food. I’m interested.”

“Do you have the food?”

“I do not,” said Nor. “I can get it for you.” She lifted one dripping hand out of the tub and pointed at Kenta like she was doing Kenta a big favor. “It is not gonna be cheap. What is this stuff? Cranberry I know. What is turkey? Is it Turkish food?”

“It’s for Thanksgiving. Humans eat this meal once a year.”

Nor looked at Kenta like he was about to lean over and throw up in her bed. “A medical thing?”

“It’s a tradition.”

“For a hundred K meals,” said Nor, “you pay seventy K credits. Bulk discount.”

Kenta wasn’t worth seventy thousand credits. That was the cost of a university education, albeit at a state school with an underperforming football team. “There’s a million meals floating around,” said Kenta. “I just need ten percent of them. How about fifty K?”

“So you don’t have seventy?” said Nor. “That’s too bad. I hate negotiating as much as you must hate thanks-giving traditions.”

Kenta was so close to the goal, and the possible next steps were receding out of view. If he was honest, forty thousand credits was just as impossible as seventy thousand. There was only one trick left up Kenta’s sleeve. The Fist hadn’t shut down the brands, which meant they weren’t fighting total war. On some level they recognized that the Fist and the Outreach would one day go back to peacetime trade. They couldn’t risk the bad PR of letting millions of civilians die. This was an exploitable weakness in their strategy.

“I was hoping,” said Kenta, “that you could talk to your military, and arrange, uh, as a—” What was the D for ‘humanitarian’? “—feel-like-you-behaved-morally gesture, to deliver Thanksgiving dinner to the occupied areas. You know, for the troops.”

“You lost me,” said Nor. “Why is the military involved in this?”

“‘Cause of the war.”

“The war?”

“Yes, ma’am, the war going on right now,” said Kenta, a little confused, mentally kicking himself because of course you couldn’t play the ‘support the troops’ card on the enemy. “Which as enlightened beings of business, we are able to—”

“Oh, did the war start and nobody told me? And your first instinct is to go around delivering food? Because when the balloon goes up I’m getting the hell out of Outreach space.”

“Ma’am, war was declared three weeks ago,” said Kenta. “This space is under Fist occupation. That’s why you’re here, right?”

Nor pulled her handheld terminal out of the water and looked at it. She cocked her head and squinted at Kenta. “You are insane,” she said.

“Uh, no, ma’am,” said Kenta, feeling the all-important issue of the turkey dinners slipping off the agenda. The hopore, who’d never been more than a few steps out of Kenta’s personal space, now clapped a hand on Kenta’s shoulder. “Not insane, in fact…”

“There’s going to be a war,” said Nor. “Any shift now. That’s why I’m hiding in bed instead of enjoying your lovely station. So when you come in and try to startle me by telling me the war has started, I think you are either insane or you are trying to make me become violent.”

“We are at war, ma’am! I saw action, at Mas’pl! I was serving on Enterprise, and—”

“Enterprise?” said Nor. With her henchman grabbing Kenta in a death grip, Nor became a bit more easygoing. She chuckled and fart-bubbles rippled to the surface of her hot tub. “Enterprise, like Star Trek? Captain Kirk?”

“Yeah, you’ve heard of him?” Kenta was desperate to regain that vanished connection that had Nor offering to find the Thanksgiving food for him. “Jim Kirk, hell of a C.O.”

“Ahhhhnng.” The look on Nor’s face was like she’d finally figured it out. “Reality is you’ve been taking Evidence.”

“Evidence is the problem!” said Kenta. “We got hit with it at Mas’pl! Jim Kirk’s in a fucking rehab center because your military shoved Evidence up his brain!”

“Okay, no,” said Nor, “Not gonna take the blame for this one. Why don’t you use that computer you have up your brain, and look up Captain Kirk on your Internet?”

“I don’t want to,” said Kenta. Gossip about the old man’s personal life was irrelevant to this mission.

“You ask the Internet about Captain Jim Kirk,” said Nor firmly, “and then we can do business based on a shared understanding of the facts.”

“I don’t want to,” said Kenta. There was nothing else to say. The only possible next step towards completing the mission was to avoid certain pieces of information.

“Jam-es…” Nor read English text off her handheld terminal, stumbling over the names. “Jam-es Tibe-ri-us Kirk is a fictional character in the transmedia Star Trek franchise, managed by Terran Universal Intellectual Capital. Kirk is most commonly portrayed as a human military officer in command of the Enterprise—”

“Shut up!”

“Droqi, slap him,” said Nor. The hopore stepped around and smacked Kenta across the face with his broad skinny hand. Kenta’s vision blurred and Droqi’s hand came back across his face and now Kenta’s blood was on it.

“One slap is plenty!” said Nor. “Don’t send him to the hospital. Reality, my friend, is you’ve been taking Evidence. Sometimes it makes people not remember—”

“I remember.”

Kenta had a second set of memories that didn’t fit. That was how the Evidence weapon worked: it changed humans’ personalities by making them live through a fictional event.

“But Evidence is just a medium for propaganda,” said the man in the Public Affairs uniform. “We counterprogram enemy films and news broadcasts. There’s no reason we can’t do the same with hallucinogens!

“The enemy’s entire strategy is based on using Evidence to turn brave spacemen into sniveling pacifists. With a properly constructed scenario, we can inoculate you. Hell, we can make you a better spaceman than you were.

The rre psychologist in the surgeon’s exobody was sitting next to Kenta in the briefing room. “This is an experimental treatment that will change your personality,” thon said. “We need to be clear on both points of this.”

“I have to change,” said Kenta. “I can’t keep screwing up like this. Not if there’s going to be a war.”

“Complete the test scenario,” said the rre, “and there will be no trial, no dishonorable discharge. You will have changed your past. When you come home you will be able to look your father in the eye. Furthermore, you will deserve his pride. You will be a spaceman who completes his assignment, step by step, no matter what.”

“I’ll do it,” Kenta had said. “I said I’ll do it!”

“Oh, God,” said Kenta. “I killed Achipex. I killed him for no reason.”

“Welcome to war, human,” said Nor. She hoisted herself out of the hot tub. She glanced into the swirling water and pulled out a big purple sponge and took a bite. “Do you still want the food?” she said with her mouth full. Kenta stared at the sponge in her hand. “The cranberry? Or was it Jim Kirk told you to bring it?”

Kenta shook his head yes. “I need the food,” he said. He had nothing left now but the hope that if he completed the assignment, step by step, it would cancel out everything he’d done to get from one step to the next.

“Now the three of us will take a trip to a doctor I know.” Nor stood up in the jacuzzi and stuffed the remainder of the sponge into her mouth and pulled on a pair of water-repellent hot pink sweatpants. “Mmmph. Then I can do you a deal on some surplus cranberry.”

“Why the doctor?”

“Blood samples and brain scans. The Evidence you took is not ours. Clearly you have no money, but maybe your body remembers the recipe. We don’t do Star Trek.”

“Why not?”

“I guess trademark problems,” said Nor. “Terran Universal Intellectual Capital won’t give us permission, so we back off. Hey, but if the Outreach Navy does the dirty work, and we just reverse engineer, it’s not really our problem, is it?”

“Maybe you should talk to a lawyer about this first,” said Kenta. “Just to be sure.”

“The war is coming,” said Nor. She stepped out of the jacuzzi and pushed past Kenta. “Afterwards the lawyers will have their fun. Come, my human friend. You will pay for your cranberry in blood.”

* * *

There was, of course, no Fist of Joy occupation fleet in the space around Rodondi Point IV. This made it very easy to drop onto an orbit, but also served as an unfortunate reminder that Kenta had probably bent the rules of this assignment more than was allowed.

“Cargo vessel Camille to flight control,” said Kenta.

“Flight control here. Who is this?”

“This is cargo vessel Camille,” said Kenta. “Registration number—”

“No, I understand that, who are you?”

“Spaceman Kenta Imura, sir.”

“Where did you get a… You are reported lost, Camille. What happened to you? We’re expecting to talk to a Mr. Achipex.”

“Achipex didn’t make it, control. I have the cargo. I could only get twenty thousand turkey dinners. That’s the best I could do.”

A human marine in office fatigues dropped into Camille’s now-functional 3-tank, staring at Kenta in disbelief. Kenta smiled hopefully and held out a shiny silver packet of chunks, turkey, in gravy. “Hold your orbit, Camille,” said the marine. His image froze and a moment later resumed with an uhaltihaxl lieutenant standing on tiptoe to look at Kenta over the human marine’s shoulder.

“Ma’am.” Kenta saluted sharply.

“What the fuck are you doing, Camille?” said the LT. “nine days late, you don’t…it’s like some juvenile black-ops stunt. I told the colonel this was a bad idea.”

“No, ma’am, I did it,” said Kenta. “I completed the assignment.” He tore open the packet and it became warm in his hand. The rich brown sauce squeezed into microgravity in abstract toothpaste shapes. It had cost him an ounce of spinal fluid, but he’d brought the marines of Rodondi Point their Thanksgiving dinner. Kenta looked eagerly into the tank, waiting for the LT’s approval.

“Yeaaaah, I’m gonna get the colonel,” she said.

* * *

Going back to New Manitoba confirmed to Kenta that his past was real. His parents, with all their flaws, were the reason he had volunteered for the Navy’s experiment, not a fake backstory created by the experiment itself. Dad came perilously close to showing an emotion while visiting Kenta in the hospital, and now that they were actually at a college football game, he was starting to crack.

The marching band extruded onto the astroturf and launched into the Navy anthem. That’s it, Kenta thought. I should have joined a Navy band. That was the way out. There was discipline, tradition, a nice uniform. You went out on the field but no one expected you to play football.

Dad stood up straight when the band got to the Navy anthem, facing front but not quite “at attention” because his right hand was fumbling around for Kenta’s hand. There was a rustle throughout the stadium as the other Navy vets in the crowd stood for the anthem. More people were standing than Kenta remembered. The Fist of Joy had been creating veterans at a terrifying rate.

Kenta took Dad’s hand and stood as well, two servicemen standing side by side, and that’s when Dad finally lost it, quaking and crying and crushing Kenta’s hand. It was a good thing Dad’s eyes were squeezed closed, because it meant what happened next didn’t ruin the moment he’d been anticipating since Kenta was born.

The applause for the veterans dissolved into gasps and sputtering shouts all around the stadium. A group of Navy veterans from Kenta’s generation had carefully positioned themselves throughout the stands, stood up with the rest, and now they held blazing 3-transmitters which filled the entire football stadium with an enormous flashing rotating hologram reading STOP THE WAR.

Enterprise wasn’t a real vessel and CPO Niyazov wasn’t a real person, but there were thousands of real people like him and this was what they did now. When Evidence fucked up a spaceman who was a real patriot and not a coward, that spaceman did not accept a Skein Cross and step down quietly. A real spaceman used his or her training on a new and urgent mission: STOP THE WAR.

As recordings of the protest poured into New Manitoba’s social media, the on-planet brands detected controversy and the advertisement 2-screens around the stadium went blank. Campus security officers ran down the steps of the bleachers, shouting into their terminals. Security forces throughout the Outreach were rapidly learning the most effective way to haul off disabled veterans in front of huge crowds.

Kenta was not a protestor. He was just a student at this college, a freshman at twenty-one. His father was proud of him. He was invisible, a medical casualty in a flood of medical casualties. For the first time in his life, it was safe to be a coward.