A Promising Candidate

“Mr. Winnipeg, do you know why we are having this interview?”

Arthur Winnipeg frowned. The speaker regarded him from behind a fancy desk, expressionless and nondescript in a suit as pristine as the office’s furnishings. The hair on his head had either been shaved or fallen out, making it difficult to ascertain his age, and a pair of tinted glasses hid his eyes. His hands were folded precisely in the desk's center over a crisp official-looking form.

“I’ve got an idea, anyway.” Winnipeg rubbed unconsciously at his bandaged right wrist which until a few weeks ago had been connected to a working right hand. This place made him feel uncomfortable with its wood paneling and the gilt details on the wall-mounted lighting. His faded overcoat and scars didn’t belong here.

The man offered a coldly official smile. He didn’t have any visible scars. “Would you like to elaborate?”

“If you want me to I can. Uh. This is about the pirate attack on one of your vessels, yeah? The X1854-23, where I was quartermaster?”

“I assume that by ‘my’ vessels, you are referring to the government.”

“Well yeah, I have no idea who you are personally. Don’t know why they’d have the man holding the purse strings come interview a space dog like me.”

“Indeed.” The man jotted something down on the form before folding his hands over it again. “Mr. Winnipeg, would you care to recount the incident from your own point of view?”

Winnipeg didn’t answer immediately. “You’re not thinking of holding me liable for the damaged property, are you? I know I’m the highest-ranking survivor from the crew.”

“No, we are not.” He did not hesitate to deliver this statement. “But we are thorough in our record keeping when it comes to such incidents, and there are some questions we have as to what happened that only you will be able to answer. Surely as a quartermaster you can understand the need for thorough records.”

“Dunno that I’m still quartermaster of anything, seeing as I don’t have a captain to work under anymore,” Winnipeg muttered. “But yeah, if it makes your job easier, why not? And, uh. Before I start, I was told that you’d be able to give me my final wages. I’m going to need that.”

The man nodded but did not elaborate or, indeed, produce a check. Winnipeg sighed and leaned back in his chair so it creaked.

“You know the date already and what we were shipping, so I’ll skip right to the evening of the event. It was about… oh, 1830 by Icy-K’s time, which was where we’d just left port. The cargo was delivered, general mood was good after a night spent planetside, and the cook had promised us a few fresh meals as she always did after we came away from a planet.” He fidgeted. “I include these details not to fluff out the story, sir, but to explain why we weren’t prepared to be boarded. We just had no idea our attackers would be so stupid or desperate as to board when we’d only just left the seat of the Lit Tritsii, when we weren’t likely to be carrying anything worthwhile and everyone was likely as not going to be awake. It didn’t make sense, so we weren’t ready when it happened.”

Another note jotted down. "Indeed. Please continue."

"They weren't subtle with their methods either. Blew a hole in the side of the cargo bay, taking out a few good men in the process. I was walking down that way to see how much the cook had taken out of our long-term rations, and when the ship pitched beneath my feet, well, I'd been flying long enough to know it wasn't debris hitting the hull. Something was wrong."

For a moment, he could feel the metal plated floor shudder beneath the soles of his shoes, hear the terrific boom mixed with creaking groaning ship parts and, whether it had been his imagination or not, the distant screams of the dying. The phantom aroma of burning ammunition tickled the inside of his nose. Winnipeg breathed deeply.

"Faced with a situation like that,” he continued in a matter-of-fact voice, “there wasn't much in the way of a choice as to what I did next, just instinct. I ran toward the source of the sound. It should be no surprise to you that when I entered the cargo bay I was promptly greeted by about a dozen gun barrels. The pirates took my weapons and held me at gunpoint."

"That's curious, Mr. Winnipeg."

Winnipeg's posture stiffened, and his hazel eyes snapped to the other’s face. "Is it, sir?"

The man inclined his head with another small smile. "In their dealings with the rest of the crew, the pirates showed no hesitation in killing those caught unarmed and unawares. Why would they make an exception for you?"

The man betrayed no hint of suspicion in his voice, but the purpose of the question didn't go unnoticed. Winnipeg set his jaw stubbornly. "If you're concerned that I was working as a plant for them, sir, rest assured that they had other reasons for sparing me. I was wearing my officer's uniform. They needed an officer to get through the lock on the safe down there."

"Naturally." The man sounded as though this did not surprise him in the least, which was encouraging. Winnipeg leaned forward slightly.

"You'll know all about our safe. Eight foot by eight foot, door made from tempered formite, all built into the structure of the ship. What’s most important is it’s sealed with a state of the art biometric lock that only opens to certain officials planetside along with a few officers who might need access. That includes the quartermaster. And they wanted in."

Winnipeg bowed his head to fiddle with the bandages covering his severed wrist again, for the first time feeling a little nauseous. "So that part of the story isn't complicated. I resisted when they tried to get me to put my hand on the plate."

"Even though there was nothing of value inside the safe at the time, Mr. Winnipeg?"

Winnipeg sighed. Perhaps the most unbelievable part of his story. "In some circumstances I can be a very stubborn person, sir. They'd caught me with my pants down, but I wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of me bending to their orders like a scared kid. Regardless of what it cost me, I can't say that I'd do differently a second time."

"They removed your hand when you refused to cooperate."

Winnipeg barked out a bleak laugh without looking up. "As you like it. Didn't have the courtesy to use an energy blade, but then I suspect more than one of their number liked the smell of blood and watching other people writhe in pain. They could have wrestled me to the door if they wanted to."

A long, impassive pause. "I see. What did they do then?"

"Once they had my hand? Dumped me in the hall to bleed out while they went for the safe again."

"They left you unmonitored?"

"Nah. There was some weasely little guy they left with me, possibly a new recruit. He seemed on edge about the whole thing."

The man didn't respond right away but watched Winnipeg as though expecting him to continue. When he didn't, the man made another note.

"That all seems to be in order, Mr. Winnipeg. Now we can get to the main reason for summoning you to our offices."

The corner of Winnipeg's mouth twitched like he was about to smile, nausea gone. "And that is?"

The man removed the tinted glasses to regard him with dark, unreadable eyes. "What happened next, Mr. Winnipeg?"

Winnipeg took his time to think it over. The memories flashed across his mind's eye like a nightmare he'd only just awoken from: the new pirate playing with a LZR pistol as he leered at the downed officer. The scrawny ankles as he came just a little too close. An impact, a squeal as the pirate fell bodily to the floor. Confused scuffling, a muffled grunt. A flash, and sudden stillness.

"I killed him with his own gun, sir."

His interviewer's brow arced. "Yes?"

"As I said, he wasn't very experienced." Winnipeg shrugged as though that explained everything. "I guess I wasn’t that experienced either since he was the first person I ever killed, not that it matters much to the story."

"And he wasn't the last."

"Guess not.” Winnipeg continued to talk easily, the only sign of nerves the bouncing of his leg. “At any rate, I didn't think about it too much since I was bleeding and needed to do something about that. I wasn't wearing a belt, but fortunately my binder had straps I could slip out of their loops." He hesitated. "You, uh, know what-?"

"Yes, I know what a binder is Mr. Winnipeg. Please continue."

Winnipeg's mouth twitched again. "Anyways. I pulled out the strap and used it to slow the bleeding, though I didn't get it tight enough to stop it all the way, working with one hand as I was. And then…"

He trailed off. The dark hall outside of the hold seemed to loom up in front of him. The pain had pressed in, no longer unbearable but enough to make thinking a chore. He could still hear the shouts of the pirates in the room beyond, a sound that chilled his blood yet cleared his mind at the same time.

"And then you decided to hunt them down, one at a time."

Winnipeg calmly met the man's eyes. "Yes sir."

"Instinct again?"

"No sir." He hesitated. "I just… I guess I didn't like the idea of waiting for them to come finish me off. I'm a man of action."

"So you finished them off instead."

Winnipeg smiled. "Yeah, that's about right."

The interviewer’s eyes remained emotionless, but a spark of interest flickered there all the same.

"How?"

Winnipeg tapped the fingers of his left hand against the edge of the desk. “Just working with what I had, mostly. First I needed to get them out of the hold. The main advantage I had over the pirates was I knew my ship like the back of my hand, and that included where mechanical was. It was on the same level, so shaky as I was I could get there. And the first thing I did was kill the lights."

The man nodded slowly. "I see."

Winnipeg laughed. "And they couldn't. I waited holed up in there for them to send another inexperienced kid my way. Instead, three of the burlier ones with flashlights popped up in the doorway. I mean, I'd hidden myself behind the generator so that was alright."

He leaned back further so the front legs of his chair left the floor. Winnipeg's expression might have belonged to a man recalling what he'd bought at the grocery store yesterday. "The temptation first off was to start shooting as soon as I could see them by their own lights, you know, but that was no good. The pistol I'd taken couldn't shoot multiple people at once. But I'd grabbed an extension cord from the drawer before I killed the lights, just in case, and got my first one by strangling him from behind."

"With one hand."

"I'm pretty good with tangible problems, sir. I made kind of a noose out of it and used my teeth a little too."

The man looked incredulous but sighed. "That explains one of the bodies we found, at least," he remarked begrudgingly.

"I made it work. The other two hardly had any reason for alarm, since the engine was still going so loud they hadn't heard their friend fighting me in the dark. I went ahead and used the pistol then. With one dead, I only had one aware of my presence, and I got him before he could radio his buddies."

The man frowned. "Did you worry that they might be survivors of your own crew when they first appeared?"

Something hard entered Winnipeg's face though he continued to smile. "No, sir. I recognized their voices from the party we had in the hold."

The interviewer's pen scratched away for almost a minute this time. "Right. That accounts for four non-personnel bodies. We recovered nine."

"Yeah, you wouldn't know about the two I jettisoned out the airlock."

The pen's scratching stopped. "We… did not know about those."

Winnipeg brought the front legs of his chair back down to the floor. "Maybe I should just run down the list then. I got a knife off one of the bodies in mechanical, and I used that on a pair I caught in the hall coming to check on the others. That's six. They had buddies coming along behind them who I couldn't catch off-guard, but they might have seen me duck into a room that turned out to be an airlock and, well, I got them off the ship pretty quickly. That's eight. The three after that… They were harder."

"Yes?"

Winnipeg scratched his chin thoughtfully. "I mean. All your work friends die or go missing, you start getting suspicious of the guy you didn't kill earlier right? Not that it did them much good in the end. Three people isn’t enough to run a ship, and they had to split up eventually.”

“And you picked them off as well.”

Winnipeg’s smile faded as his memories resurged once more. A game of cat and rat in the dark all along that lowest level, hardly daring to breathe in case it tipped someone off. A quick thrust and a gush of blood only to hear cries of alarm from the adjacent room. Running, the clang of footsteps changing the nature of the game entirely. Laser blasts lighting the passage in shocking relief for split seconds at a time. The flash of a knife from the side followed by pain, and a moment when he wasn’t really sure what he was seeing. Just blasts of light and looming shadows and blood and screams in the dark, until finally he was the only thing that moved. Until he had won.

His heart almost skipped a beat. Stars, what was wrong with him?

“I did sir, yeah.”

“What did you do once they were dead?”

“Well I gathered myself, found the coms, and sent for help on Icy-K. I didn’t get a lot out before the blood loss finally took its toll, and I passed out. Then I woke up in a hospital, so… that’s it, I guess.”

Another long minute of a pen scratching against paper. Winnipeg slid half off his seat, unsure of what was expected of him and worried about what the official government man would say next.

“That’s all you needed, right? If you’ve got my check, I can just-”

“There is one more thing, actually, Mr. Winnipeg.”

He slid reluctantly back onto the chair. He looked like a man braced for the worst. “Yes sir?”

The man finished his notes on the form, set the pen down, and folded his hands in the exact center of his desk once more. His eyes bored into Winnipeg’s. “You have mentioned that you may no longer have a post due to the loss of your commanding officers and the damage done to your vessel.”

“Unless you say something differently, then yes sir.” Winnipeg returned the gaze curiously.

“I ask because I have been authorized to extend an offer of employment to you.”

The relief in Winnipeg’s grin was palpable. “That’s good to hear. Which ship?”

The man’s smile reminded him of a steel trap. “It’s not that sort of employment, Mr. Winnipeg.”

"... Can I ask what kind of employment it is then?"

"There are details I am not authorized to disclose until you have officially signed on. That in and of itself should give you some ideas as to the nature of your potential employment."

Winnipeg turned this over in his mind. He felt more than a little bewildered. "How's this question instead: why?" When he didn't immediately receive a reply, he elaborated. "Honestly sir, I was half expecting to be arrested whether the men I killed were pirates or not. I didn't… the um. The blanket of self-defense only covers you so much, right? And I don't… I'm a bad person I guess, but I don't feel much about it. Not that I'm complaining about your choices, obviously, just. Why?"

The official watched Winnipeg closely for one long half a minute. "Mr. Winnipeg, we have dossiers on the mercenaries you dispatched. They may have shown definite inexperience in this sort of work, but some of them were very dangerous people. Natalie Zeigler, Job Figg, and Taylor Yates each had known body counts reaching toward fifty. From what we can ascertain they had been hired with the express intention of stealing the lock from your vessel so a foreign agency could reverse engineer it. Believe it or not, at least some of their number knew exactly what they were doing when they attacked your ship."

"They couldn't be that good sir." It was Winnipeg's turn to sound incredulous. "I killed them, didn't I?"

"That's why we're interested in hiring you."

Winnipeg sat in a stunned silence. "I. Well I guess that tracks." Beat. "I might need some time to think it over."

"Then maybe it's time I show you the sign-on bonus." And from a drawer in the desk the man produced a gleaming brass prosthetic hand. Winnipeg leaned forward, the shock and delight clear on his face. He could tell just by looking at it that this intricate piece of engineering cost more to make than he made in six months' time.

"One of the orderlies from your hospital stay procured the dimensions for us. It should fit perfectly. Of course you'll need some minor surgery to link it with your nervous system, but after it should perform as well as the one you lost. And it comes with a concealed blade."

Winnipeg fell back in his chair, speechless. Once he recovered, however, he laughed.

"Alright. When do I start?"

An Interrogation >