Writing in Public: Story 4, Chapter 27
[image error]CHAPTER 27
Graul folded his arms across his chest and stared at the image of the 49er city near the GALCOM camp, wanting better answers than he had. The red night lights made it look too bright over the top of his executive conference room table.
The door swooshed open behind him. The smell of chicken came with it. His stomach rumbled.
He glanced over his shoulder. Marotta. She held out a plate of drumsticks and greens.
“You need to eat, sir.”
He took it without comment, glad for food with a handle. He didn’t want to deal with a fork.
“Any ideas?” she asked.
“No. We’re very limited in our options. Look where the 49ers are holding our people.” Graul pointed with his pinkie finger to the stationary green dots. One of those was Mel. He’d looked at all of them, but he couldn’t tell which.
“Everyone’s still alive,” Marotta said. “But all the CTUs deployed. Doctor says some of the injured aren’t going to be able to walk out on their own.”
“Which means Hope’s going to have to walk into the city to even get near our people. Chances are, the 49ers are going to just grab her and try to force her to kill the ghosts. She can’t do that. What’s going to happen to our people?”
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Graul had insisted that Hope and Zuver eat and rest while they waited for the additional reinforcements to come.
“An army can’t fight on an empty stomach,” Graul said. “Right now, you’re my front line troops.”
Hope didn’t feel like a front line troop. But she dutifully dug out two meal packets and passed one over to Zuver. She didn’t even look at the label to see what she was getting, or if it was even spicy. She just tore open the entre packet and ate, hardly tasting it.
Somehow, she must have dozed off, because the next thing she knew Zuver was frantically shaking her.
“There’s someone outside,” he whispered.
Hope sat up, alarmed. It was just after dawn, the sky still topped with gray.
But then she heard a familiar sound, a male voice: “Hey!”
She grinned and scrambled to the window, the blanket tangling around her legs. “The reinforcements are here.”
Two shuttles were parked nearby. Outside, she found the additional Marines Graul had sent breaking down the tents and folding them up. Three others took a hammer and muscles to pull up the tent pegs from the sand’s grip. Two Marines grabbed an end of a large box and carried it to their shuttle.
All the activity only served to remind Hope what she was going to do today—and she still didn’t know.
“Miss Hope,” Zuver said from the shuttle doorway.
She joined him.
“Do you want a crazy idea?” he asked.
“I’ll take crazy, because I don’t even have a dumb idea,” she said.
He squatted in the doorway, which put him close to her height. “I’m a scientist. I like gathering facts and evidence to show something exists. It’s hard for me sometimes because I think that everyone should see those facts and evidence and give it the same credibility I do.”
Hope wished he would get to the point, but held her words back. She needed all the help she could get and muscle power wasn’t going to be enough—at least not without more lives being lost. She wasn’t sure what the angry ghosts would do if they couldn’t get the 49ers. They might tear apart her friends’ ghosts.
Zuver hunched his shoulders. “Some people need a story or a show to believe the science. And sometimes they hear the story and if it’s good enough to them, they’ll believe it over the facts and evidence.”
He fell silent, watching her face.
Hope folded her arms across her chest and paced, turning his words over in her head and looking at them this way and that way.
“Like the patent medicines in the eighteen hundreds?”
Hope remembered reading that in the ship’s library on her off time. ‘Female complaints’ were a common ailment patent medicine treated—though it was anybody’s guess what was in the medicine. But men sold it with charm and flair, and desperate people bought it.
The 49ers were desperate. And better still, the ghosts couldn’t talk to them.
Maybe. Maybe.
Filed under: Writing in Public Tagged: GALCOM Universe
