The Journey Home, Part 2 (Ch 10)
Chapter 10
Moments after the CO and the XO left the infirmary, Major Hones ordered the restraints removed from the three men. “I’ll take Posey, and we’ll lead. Lt. Devlin, you follow with Schaeffer. Captain Harrison, you bring up the rear with Wilson. Weapons set to Stun. If any of them so much as twitch, deliver a single shot to the center of the back. Then drag what’s left to the brig.”
All three prisoners heard her instructions.
Wilson and Schaeffer stood next to their beds and put their hands behind their backs. Harrison and Devlin locked restraints around their wrists.
Still on his back, Posey only glared at Hones, his fingers now interlocked behind his head on the pillow.
“Get up, Mr. Posey.”
He sat up on the edge of his bed and sneered. “You really think you’re gonna get me there?”
“Upright or prone. Your choice.” She tossed a ball gag onto his lap. “Put this on.”
Instead he charged her.
She swung her right hand and caught him on the temple with her phase pistol.
He dropped to his hands and knees just outside the cubicle, moaning and shaking his head.
“Lt. Devlin, cover me please.”
A few feet behind her, Devlin trained her pistol on Posey.
Without looking back, Hones holstered her pistol and picked up the gag. She stepped over Posey’s back, strapped the gag around his head and secured it.
He only shook his head.
She stepped back, pulled her phase again, and gestured. “Get up. And move.”
Posey uneasily got to his feet and began staggering forward. He tried to yell past the gag. What came out sounded like, “You hurt me!”
Behind him, Major Hones smiled. “Give me a reason, Mr. Posey.”
He didn’t. Ten minutes later he and the other two were secured in separate soundproof cells.
The brig was small with only one aisle and one row of five cells on each side. Like the cubicles in the infirmary, the cells were made of a clear acrylic, but they were only half the size at five by five. They had no amenities other than a small raised platform in one corner with a four-inch hole in the center. Adjudication was expected to be swift, so prisoners weren’t expected to experience a long stay.
As she and the other two security personnel stepped into the hallway, Major Hones contacted the XO. “The prisoner are secured in the brig, sir. Hones out.”
*
In her office, General Lowrey made an entry in her personal log. In it, she outlined the situation that had occurred, the swift resolution, and her visit with the prisoners in the infirmary. That visit had bothered her, especially Mr. Posey’s attitude. She wasn’t concerned with what she would have to do in adjudicating the matter. She wasn’t even worried about the punishment she would more than likely have to levy on the perpetrators.
But she was worried about why.
She rocked back in her chair. “Computer, pause log entry.”
When talking with Mr. Posey in the infirmary, she had put on a good show, primarily for Mr. Posey’s benefit and the benefit of her security officers. But now that she was alone, the weight of her responsibility and what she was about to do—the decision she was about to have to make—settled over her.
When she’d signed on for the mission, she hadn’t had a problem with the possibility of having to commit to having a bad guy loaded into the disposal tube, or even throwing the switch. She’d readily agreed to accept her responsibility in that regard as in all others accruing to her role as the commanding officer of a generation ship. After all, her first responsibility always was to ensure the future of humanity.
But in all the years she’d been aboard The Ark, that possibility had never been real before. And now it was.
Yes, she’d had to evict three repop couples because of disharmony and replace them with three other couples. That decision wasn’t difficult decision to make at all. One half of each couple she’d summarily dismissed and sent back to Earth had admitted culpability.
But she’d only sent them back to Earth in a shuttle. She hadn’t ejected them into open space at millions of miles per hour or otherwise caused them the slightest harm. If anything, she’d given them the opportunity to work out their problems. Once they were out of her line of sight and removed from the society for which she was responsible, they were no longer her problem.
In her own personal, private life back on Earth, she’d secretly ascribed to the socialist concept that the good of the many outweighed the good of the few. In the eventual utopia she envisioned on a planet she wouldn’t live to see, society would have responsibility for society—and for the individuals within that society—for the overall good of the society. Therefore, civilization would flourish, minus the interpersonal and international violence that occurred regularly on Earth and all the silly headaches that come with it.
In her beliefs, civilization was everything, and individual responsibility was set aside as unnecessary and self-defeating. No individual could be allowed to exist outside the societal structure. No individual could be allowed to put his or her sense of personal responsibility above that which would benefit society.
So now she was faced with a conundrum. She would have to either abandon her beliefs and force Misters Posey, Schaeffer and Wilson to accept the personal responsibility for their actions—or she would have to decline her own responsibility and abandon her oath to safeguard the future of humanity. It was as simple as that. In the latter case, she would let them live on, albeit locked away for awhile, just in case they might someday contribute to that society.
It was not an easy decision to make. Because it had become real. It had become black or white with no grey ground in the middle. Eventually she would have to come down on one side or the other of that decision, though her order for DNA testing would delay the decision for a while. But either way, tomorrow or the next day or the next, she would be forced to take personal responsibility for her own actions.
With any luck, the results of the DNA testing would prove a mismatch, that Mr. Posey was not actually Mr. Posey at all. That he did not actually exist in his true form on The Ark and could therefore be disposed of without personal consequence to herself. Her hands would be clean, her conscience clear, and her oath intact. And if the results on the other two came back the same, so much the better.
Those results would prove the impostor or impostors had denied the real Mr. Posey and the others passage into the future on this ship. As a result, those impostors themselves, not she, might as well have flung themselves into open space and taken their own lives. It would be their foolishly taken personal responsibility, not hers.
But she feared those would not be the results.
Perhaps taking personal responsibility for one’s own actions was the way things should have been all along. That would at least end the duality and bring her into line with her role as the commanding officer. But if Misters Posey, Schaeffer and Wilson were actually who they said they were, she would have to make a decision—three decisions—and then live with those decisions forever.
So everything depended on those results. If the men were who they actually claimed to be, she would be backed into a corner.
If she adhered to her secret beliefs, she would have no choice but to let them live. Even though doing so would endanger the future of all humanity, albeit in the name of salvaging it. Plus it would sabotage her own position as the commanding officer.
But if she abandoned her beliefs and upheld her oath, she would have blood on her hands.
But wouldn’t that also serve the future of humanity?
She shook her head, rose and walked to the replicator. “Double scotch, neat.”