Two minutes later Abernathy, Dahl and Finn came through the door. Weston smiled and addressed Finn.
"Finn, you shot me," he said.
"Sorry," Finn said.
"It"s all right," Weston said. "I figured I would get shot. I just didn"t know it would be you who did it."
"Captain Bullington said you were ready to confess, but that you wanted to confess to me," Abernathy said. "I"m here."
"Yes you are," Weston said.
"Tell us what your relationship is with the Calendrian rebels," Abernathy said.
"The who what now?" Weston said.
"The Calendrian rebels," Abernathy repeated.
"I have no idea what you"re talking about," Weston said.
"You fired on the pontifex"s ship after the Intrepid was disabled by the rebels," Abernathy said. "You can"t honestly expect us to believe that the two were unrelated."
"They are related," Weston said. "Just not that way."
"You"re wasting my time," Abernathy said, and turned to go.
"Don"t you want to know what the connection is?" Weston asked.
"We know what the connection is," Abernathy said. "It"s the Calendrian rebels."
"No," Weston said. "The connection is you."
"What?" Abernathy said, squinting.
Weston turned to Finn. "Sorry you had to be here," he said, and then started blinking one eye at a time, first two left, then three right, then one left, then three right.
"Bomb!" Finn yelled, and Dahl flung himself at the captain as Weston"s head exploded. Dahl felt the uniform and skin on his back fry in the heat as the blast wave pushed him into Abernathy, crushing the two of them against the wall.
Some indeterminate time later Dahl heard someone shout his name, looked up and saw Abernathy grabbing and shaking him. Abernathy had burns on his hands and arms but appeared largely fine. Dahl had shielded him from the worst of the blast. Upon realizing that, the whole of Dahl"s back seared into painful life.
Dahl pushed Abernathy away from him and crawled over to Finn, on the floor, his face and front burned. He had been closest to the blast. As Dahl made it to his friend, he saw that the one eye Finn had remaining had looked over to him. Finn"s hand twitched and Dahl grabbed it, causing Finn to spasm in pain. Dahl tried to break contact but Finn grabbed on. His lips moved.
Dahl moved to his friend"s face to hear what he had to say.
"This is just ridiculous," is what Finn whispered.
"I"m sorry," Dahl said.
"Not your fault," Finn eventually said.
"I"m still sorry," Dahl said.
Finn gripped Dahl"s hand tighter. "Find a way to stop this," he said.
"I will," Dahl said.
"Okay," Finn breathed, and died.
Abernathy came over to pull Dahl away from Finn. Despite the pain, Dahl took a swing at Abernathy. He missed and lost consciousness before his fist had swung all the way around.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
"Tell me how to stop this," Dahl said to Jenkins.
Jenkins, who of course knew Dahl was coming to his secret lair, looked him over. "You look healed," he said. "Good. Sorry about your friend Finn."
"Did you know what was going to happen to him?" Dahl asked.
"No," Jenkins said. "It not like whoever is writing this c.r.a.p sends me the scripts in advance. And this one was particularly badly written. Jer Weston walking around for years with a biological bomb in his head, waiting for an encounter with Captain Abernathy, who he blamed for the death of his own father on an away team twenty years ago, and taking advantage of an unrelated diplomatic incident to do so? That"s just hackwork."
"So tell me how to stop it," Dahl said.
"You can"t stop it," Jenkins said. "There"s no stopping it. There"s only hiding from it."
"Hiding isn"t an option," Dahl said.
"Sure it is," Jenkins said, and opened his arms as if to say, See?
"This is not an option for anyone else but you," Dahl said. "We can"t all sneak around in the bowels of a s.p.a.ceship."
"There are other ways to hide," Jenkins said. "Ask your former boss Collins."
"She"s only safe as long as you"re around," Dahl said. "And not using the toilet."
"Find a way off this ship, then," Jenkins said. "You and your friends."
"That won"t help either," Dahl said. "Jer Weston killed eighteen members of the Nantes crew with his armed cargo carts. They weren"t safe against what happens here on the Intrepid, were they? An entire planet suffered a plague so that we could create a last-minute vaccine for Kerensky. They weren"t safe, either. Even you"re not safe, Jenkins."
"I"m pretty safe," Jenkins said.
"You"re pretty safe because your wife was the one who died, and all you were was part of her backstory," Dahl said. "But what happens to you when one of the writers on whatever television show this is thinks about you?"
"They"re not going to," Jenkins said.
"Are you sure?" Dahl said. "On the Nantes, Jer Weston was using your trick of hiding in the cargo tunnels. That"s where we found him. That"s where we caught him. Whatever hack thought up that last episode now has it in his brain that the cargo tunnels can be used as hiding s.p.a.ces. How long until he starts thinking about you?"
Jenkins didn"t say anything to this, although Dahl couldn"t tell if it was because he was considering the idea of being in a writer"s crosshairs or because he mentioned Jenkins" wife.
"None of us are safe from this thing," Dahl said. "You lost your wife to it. I just lost a friend. You say I and all my friends are going to end up dying for dramatic purposes. I say whatever happens to us is going to happen to you, too. All your hiding doesn"t change that, Jenkins. It"s just delaying it. And meanwhile, you live your life like a rat in the walls."
Jenkins looked around. "I wouldn"t say a rat," he said.
"Are you happy living this way?" Dahl asked.
"I haven"t been happy since my wife died," Jenkins said. "It was her death that got me on to all of this anyway. Looking at the statistics of deaths on this ship, seeing how events on this ship played themselves out. Figuring that the most logical explanation was that we were part of a television show. Realizing my wife died simply to be a dramatic moment before a commercial. That in this television show, she was a bit player. An extra. She probably had about ten seconds of airtime. No one watching that episode probably has any memory of her now. Don"t know her first name was Margaret. Or that she liked white wines more than red. Or that I proposed to her in her parents" front yard during a family reunion. Or that we were married for seven years before some hack decided to kill her. But I remember her."
"Do you think she"d be happy with how you"re living?" Dahl asked.
"I think she"d understand why I do it," Jenkins said. "What I do on this ship keeps people alive."
"Keeps some people alive," Dahl said. "It"s a zero-sum game. Someone is always going to have to die. Your alert system keeps the old hands here alive, but makes it more likely the new crew get killed."
"It"s a risk, yes," Jenkins said.
"Jenkins, how long were you and your wife stationed on the Intrepid before she died?" Dahl asked.
Jenkins opened his mouth to respond and then shut it like a trap.
"It wasn"t very long, was it?" Dahl asked.
Jenkins shook his head to say no, and then looked away.
"People on this ship figured it out before you came on it," Dahl said. "Maybe they didn"t come to the same conclusions you did, but they saw what was happening and guessed their odds of survival. Now you"re giving them better tech to do the same thing to new crew that they did to your wife."
"I think you should leave now," Jenkins said, still turned away from Dahl.
"Jenkins, listen to me," Dahl said, leaning in. "There"s no way to hide from this. There"s no way to run from it. There"s no way to avoid fate. If the Narrative exists-and you and I know it does-then in the end we don"t have free will. Sooner or later the Narrative will come for each of us. It"ll use us however it wants to use us. And then we"ll die from it. Like Finn did. Like Margaret did. Unless we stop it."
Jenkins looked back over at Dahl, eyes wet. "You"re a man of faith, aren"t you, Dahl?" he said.
"You know my history," Dahl said. "You know I am."
"How can you still be?" Jenkins said.
"What do you mean?" Dahl asked.
"I mean that you and I know that in this universe, G.o.d is a hack," he said. "He"s a writer on an awful science fiction television show, and He can"t plot His way out of a box. How do you have faith when you know that?"
"Because I don"t think that"s actually G.o.d," Dahl said.
"You think it"s the show"s producer, then," Jenkins said. "Or maybe the president of the network."
"I think your definition of what a G.o.d is and what my definition is probably differ," Dahl said. "But I don"t think any of this is the work of G.o.d, or of a G.o.d of any sort. If this is a television show, then it was made by people. Whatever and however they"re doing this to us, they are just like us. And that means we can stop them. We just have to figure out how. You have to figure it out, Jenkins."
"Why me?" Jenkins asked.
"Because you know this television show we"re trapped in better than anyone else," Dahl said. "If there"s a solution or a loophole, you"re the only one who can find it. And soon. Because I don"t want any more of my friends to die because of a hack writer. And that includes you."
"We could just blow up the Intrepid," said Hester.
"It wouldn"t work," said Hanson.
"Of course it would work," Hester said. "Ka-plooey, there goes the Intrepid, there goes the show."
"The show"s not about the Intrepid," Hanson said. "It"s about the characters on it. Captain Abernathy and his crew."
"Some of them, anyway," Duvall said.
"The five main characters," Hanson amended. "If you blow up the ship, they"ll just get another ship. A better ship. They"ll just call it the Intrepid-A or something like that. It"s happened on other science fiction shows."
"You"ve been studying?" Hester said, mockingly.
"Yes, I have," Hanson said, seriously. "After what happened to Finn, I went and learned about every science fiction television show I could find."
"What did you find out?" Dahl asked. He had already briefed his friends on his latest encounter with Jenkins.
"That I think Jenkins is right," Hanson said.
"That we"re on a television show?" Duvall asked.
"No, that we"re on a bad one," Hanson said. "As far as I can tell, the show we"re on is pretty much a blatant rip-off of that show Jenkins told us about."
"Star Wars," Hester said.
"Star Trek," Hanson said. "There was a Star Wars, though. It was different."
"Whatever," Hester said. "So not only is this show we"re on bad, it"s plagiarized. And now my life is even more meaningless than it was before."
"Why would you make a show a knockoff of another show?" Duvall asked.
"Star Trek was very successful in its time," Hanson said. "So someone else came along and just reused the basic ideas. It worked because it worked before. People would still be entertained by the same stuff, more or less."
"Did you find our show in your research?" Dahl asked.
"No," Hanson said. "But I didn"t think I would. When you create a science fiction show, you create a new fictional timeline, which starts just before the production date of that television show. That show"s "past" doesn"t include the television show itself."
"Because that would be recursive and meta," Duvall said.
"Yes, but I don"t think they thought about it that hard," Hanson said. "They just wanted the shows to be realistic in their own context, and you can"t be realistic if there"s a television show version of you in your own past."