Lieutenant Roy Bancroft - Jingle Bells
Carter Schimpff
(( Vellum Pines Suburbs, Wherac-98 ))
Jovenan: We probably won’t be getting many opportunities to pause as we get closer to the park, so rest for a moment, drink water, have a snack, but stay alert. How’s the child?
Jovenan leaned against her rifle, the butt digging into the soft earth below them, and turned her back slightly toward Roy and Breys to allow better access to the child.
Roy crouched behind her and reached automatically for the tricorder at his belt.
His fingers found cold plasteel instead.
He looked down at the phase pistol with immediate distaste. A hideous thing. He’d taken it when it was offered without protest, of course – he was long past the version of himself who refused to carry a weapon simply because he hated what they were built to do.
That didn’t mean he had to like the damned thing, no matter what Alex said.
Without a tricorder, the examination became older and considerably less interesting medicine. Two fingers against Aesop’s neck found the pulse quickly – still fast, but stronger than it had been in the Wiener-mobile. His breathing remained spontaneous and regular, without the shallow hesitation Roy had seen earlier. The scalp dressing was dry. Roy lifted one eyelid, then the other; both pupils tightened against the daylight.
He pressed firmly against Aesop’s shoulder.
The boy’s face pinched. His head moved faintly away.
oO There you are. Whatever you are. Oo
Bancroft: Stable. Pulse is stronger, breathing’s better, pupils are reactive. Nothing’s bleeding that wasn’t already bleeding. ::a beat:: Upstairs? No idea. AI is more D’tin’s department… and yours… than mine.
He looked to D’tin.
Breys: I agree, but we still need to keep moving soon. Nobody can say exactly how an AI is affected by this kind of damage.
Jovenan: Good thing the Artemis is big enough a ship to warrant so many Doctors. You, MacKenzie, Renirs… And two scientists, too?
Roy shuddered, only just now remembering that the simulation had – for reasons known only to itself – elected to appoint Jozial Renirs as the town doctor.
That alone raised several deeply troubling questions about Vellum Pines’ credentialing process.
He wondered just how many patients she’d maimed. Or, perhaps more frighteningly, how freely she’d used her prescription pad.
Breys: Oh we have a lot more than that, and you’re on that roster. You’re probably the best science officer I know!
Roy looked at Jovenan.
She smiled.
Nothing happened.
No confusion. No sudden tightening around the eyes. No pause while some impossible scrap of another life shoved its way to the surface. D’tin had called her a science officer – one of the best she knew – and Jovenan received the compliment exactly as Sheriff Jovenan would.
That hurt more than Roy had expected.
He remembered Galaris IV. A dead Grunden soldier inside a holodeck recreation, his bloodstream full of particles. Jovenan had been waiting outside the wreckage for his answer, trusting a brand-new doctor to tell her what the dead could not.
He remembered the City Ship. The Golden Spire, their friends missing, a recording that showed Natasha Cole surrendering just a little too easily. Jovenan had listened when Roy told her something was wrong. She had trusted what he knew of Nat well enough to let that instinct become part of the investigation.
Callis came back physically.
Cold water around his chest. Jovenan disappearing beneath the surface. All four of them shaking hard enough to lose words. Her voice later by the fire, ordering everyone out of their wet clothes.
And then the Karnack. Phaser in his hand. Jovenan beside him. Something they had spent days fleeing standing at the end of the corridor and forcing the word pain through a mouth none of them had believed capable of speech.
She knew none of that about him now.
To her, he was the town’s architect, cosplaying as a space doctor. A stranger with a strange uniform, insisting that somewhere outside the life she remembered there was another woman with her face.
Roy smiled back.
It wasn’t a particularly convincing one.
Bancroft: D’tin’s not exaggerating. ::a beat:: I’ve trusted you with my life before, Commander. More than once.
Jovenan: If you say so. You have your old memories, um, Vellum Pines memories, too, right? What do you remember about the Joy and— Shh!
Jovenan shoved him and D’tin down behind the row of hedges. A group of people passed only a few meters away, crowding around the front door of the house beyond them. Fists pounded against wood. Someone threw a shoulder into it. Another disappeared briefly into the open garage and returned carrying a crowbar.
Jovenan: ::whispering:: Is there another way past them?
Breys: One house back has a garden with a side gate they never lock. It’s always hanging open when I walk by. If we hop a couple fences we might be able to make it past without them noticing.
Bancroft: ::hissing:: Mrs. Gunderson’s? She’s probably peeking out of her curtains even as we speak. And I don’t see us stealthily hopping fences with Mayor Backpack strapped to the Commander.
Breys: Alright, what else could we do then?
Roy looked automatically to Jovenan.
This was usually her part.
Albeit, not necessarily the immediately sensible part. Commander Jovenan had a peculiar talent for occasionally proposing something that sounded, on first hearing, like the product of a serious head injury. Then she would explain the science, or the terrain, or some obscure behavioral principle, and five minutes later Roy would find himself ankle-deep in freezing water or attempting diplomatic relations with something that had recently tried to eat him.
And it always ended up working.
He waited.
Waited for What if we simply talk to them? Or, God help him, Perhaps they’re only violent because nobody has asked them why.
Nothing came. Jovenan was looking back at him.
Waiting.
He sighed.
Bancroft: Well… they’re clearly bent on getting into that house. Maybe we wait for them to do that, then make a break for it?
Jovenan: Response
Their opportunity came moments later. With a sharp crack, the front door finally gave way and the rabble surged through it, bodies piling into the house after one another.
Breys: I like that idea, we should move.
Bancroft: On you, Command– ::catching himself:: Right, let’s go.
Jovenan: Response
They moved quickly, making their way down the street toward the park, using hedges, parked vehicles and anything else that broke the sightline between themselves and the houses around them. Jovenan carried Aesop with considerably less grace than his mayoral office presumably deserved, but the boy remained secured against her back.
Behind them, something crashed inside the house.
Breys: Did they see us?
Roy turned toward the sound, one hand settling loosely around the grip of the phase pistol.
Bancroft: I don’t think so.
A laugh drifted down the street, high and lilting, bouncing between the houses with the exaggerated rise and fall of someone performing laughter rather than experiencing it. Roy stopped. It wasn’t especially close, but neither was it distant enough to ignore, and somewhere beneath Roy’s own recognition came another one, faster and older.
Thad knew that laugh.
The thought arrived so naturally that Roy nearly accepted it before the rest of his mind caught up. At the far end of the street stood a tall, narrow figure dressed in the cream-and-gold motley Thad remembered from children’s books and faded Joy decorations. Little brass bells hung from the pointed ends of his collar and cap, and white-gloved hands rested politely behind his back. Where a face should have been, however, there was only a smooth white crescent moon: one black eye painted near the upper point, a red smile curving along the lower.
The Joy Jester.
Every child in Vellum Pines knew the story. He lived inside the moon and watched the town for children who had forgotten how to be happy. If he saw one, the stories promised, he would come down and help them find their smile again. Roy remembered the illustrations. Thad remembered believing them.
Neither memory made the figure at the end of the street any more possible.
The Jester cocked his crescent head slightly to one side, and another peal of laughter rolled toward them.
The painted mouth did not move.
Roy’s fingers closed around the phase pistol.
Bancroft: He might have.
Jovenan/Breys: Response
The Jester made no move toward them. His crescent face simply tipped a few degrees farther to one side, the pose almost playfully inquisitive – and something in Thad recognized it before Roy understood what he was seeing.
The old story supplied its own logic with horrible ease: the Joy Jester watched from the moon for unhappy children, and when he found one, he came down to help them smile again. Some buried piece of Thad accepted that explanation as readily as gravity.
Lieutenant Bancroft, meanwhile, had already started taking the street apart. Too much open ground between them and the next decent cover. The house behind them was no longer a retreat unless they fancied sharing it with a crowbar-wielding mob. Jovenan could move with Aesop, but not quickly enough to outrun much of anything while carrying him, and Roy had absolutely no idea what a phase pistol would do to a creature that technically did not exist.
His grip tightened anyway.
Bancroft: He’s not looking at us. He’s looking at Aesop.
Jovenan/Breys: Response
One white-gloved hand slipped from behind the Jester’s back and rose between them. The gesture was slow enough to be almost courteous; one finger curled inward in a patient little summons, and the brass bells at his collar answered with a cheerful jingle.
Aesop stirred.
His fingers tightened against Jovenan and his head shifted a fraction, but Roy had spent enough time watching for millimeters of improvement to know purposeful movement when he saw it.
Every instinct he had disliked the coincidence.
He shifted slightly, enough to put himself closer to the line between the Jester and Jovenan without crowding her, and tried to decide which possibility bothered him more: that Aesop could somehow hear whatever was calling him, or that some part of him recognized it.
Bancroft: Well. That’s pretty clear. ::looking to Breys and Jovenan:: We agree we can’t let the creepy clown have the Mayor, right?
As sentences went, this was not one Roy had ever imagined needing.
Jovenan/Breys: Response
TAG/TBC!
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Lieutenant Roy Bancroft
Chief Medical Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240205RB1