Free Polaris by Todd Tucker

procedure for this, disposing of a traitor. Frank sighed, just wanting it to be over.
    He pushed the FIRE button, and a pressurized air bank forced a slug of water into the tube, instantly ejecting its contents. The machinery reset itself in a way that Frank remembered, the sliding of hydraulics, the hissing of compressed air, the popping in his ears.
    Frank shut the muzzle door and reversed the process he had just done until he could once again open the breech door.
    Slowly, he opened it. He sighed with relief to see that the tube was completely empty again. Ramirez was gone.
    He shut the door and locked it, noticed the pile of Ramirez’s clothes at his feet. He was excited again now, eager to report his success to Moody, and the clothes gave him an idea. He searched the pockets, hoping to find evidence of some kind, notes about the conspiracy, maps, codes, who knows? In the back pocket, he found a standard-issue green notebook.
    He flipped through the pages until he found the most recent entry. It was a neatly kept table of handwritten data, in two rows, with “PH” at the top. He got excited—Pete Hamlin? Was this some record of their communications? A table of codes that they used?
    He looked at it further until he realized that it wasn’t “PH,” it was “pH”: a measure of the water chemistry of the primary plant, one measurement for each day of the last two weeks. The numbers meant nothing to Frank—he could see that they were drifting downward, but he didn’t know if that was bad or good.
    Frank was disappointed at that, and all the rest of the routine engineering data that filled Ramirez’s notebook. It wasn’t very compelling evidence of a conspiracy. In fact, it was downright boring.
    He gathered Ramirez’s clothes and threw them into a trash can in the back of the torpedo room. There was a shredder back there, too, so Frank dropped the notebook in it as he passed.
    There, Ramirez, he thought with a smirk as the shredder whirred to life. I deleted it.
    *   *   *
    After the degaussing, Pete followed Moody down to her stateroom, which was immediately adjacent to the captain’s. In a passing glance, he saw pictures of Captain McCallister’s family, a wife and two kids, smiling from the wall. They looked familiar to him, he thought, like maybe he had met them, or maybe they just looked familiar in the way that all happy families do, like Tolstoy said. The bed was made with military precision, but at the foot of it was a comfortable-looking striped blanket.
    Moody’s walls, in contrast, were bare of personal effects. A few professional decorations, pictures of herself from her training class, a citation from the Alliance. Files and binders neatly arranged, Navy procedures sharing a shelf with binders of Alliance doctrine. It looked so much like an office that the neatly made bed seemed out of place.
    â€œNicely done up there,” she said as they entered. She reached behind him to shut the door, close enough in the small room that Pete could smell her shampoo. “I guess you’re starting to feel like yourself again.”
    â€œI guess,” he said.
    â€œSo now that we’re degaussed, we’re ready to begin the high-speed run?”
    â€œYou’re asking me?” he said. “I thought you were in charge.”
    â€œI am now,” she said. “And keep in mind that your friend up there—” She pointed upward, in the direction of the escape trunk where Finn was locked. “—he tried to destroy it all.”
    Destroy what? he thought, but kept his mouth shut.
    â€œYou know that in a very real way, the fate of the world is in our hands,” she said. “In your hands.”
    â€œThat’s what they keep telling me,” he said.
    â€œThings have gotten worse out there. We rarely get any radio transmissions from land anymore … haven’t heard from command in weeks.