Chapter Eight

She didn’t have time to worry about her new label of Jonah on the brief trip to Alpha Centauri. A number of the crew from the Destiny Calls broke out in raging symptoms of space traumatic stress. There was a lot of fighting and name-calling among them, which the ship’s chief medical officer diagnosed as pure reaction to danger. In order to prevent violence, Dr. Harris assigned Lunzie to organise therapy for them. On her records, he had noticed the mention of Lunzie’s training in treating space-induced mental disorders and put the patients’ care in her hands.

“Now that it’s all over, they’re remembering to react,” Harris noted, privately to Lunzie, during a briefing. “Not uncommon after great efforts. I won’t interfere in the sessions. I’ll just be an observer. They know and trust you, whereas they would not open up well to me. Perhaps I can pick up pointers on technique from you.”

Lunzie held mass encounter sessions with the Destiny crew. Nearly all the survivors attended the daily meetings, where they discussed their feelings of anxiety and resentment toward the company with a good deal of fire. Lunzie listened more than she talked, making notes, and throwing in a question or a statement when the conversation lagged or went off on a tangent; and observed which employees might need private or more extensive therapy.

Lunzie found that the group therapy sessions did her as much good as they did for the other crew members. Her own anxieties and concerns were addressed and discussed thoroughly. To her relief, no one seemed to lose respect for her as a therapist when she talked about her feelings. They sympathised with her, and they appreciated that she cared about their mental well-being, not clinically distant, but as one of them.

The mainframe and drives engineers were the most stressed out, but the worst afflicted with paranoid disorders were the service staff. They complained of helplessness throughout the time they’d spent awake helping to clean up the Destiny Calls, since they could do nothing to better the situation for themselves or anyone else. For the mental health of the crew at large. Captain Wynline had ordered stressed employees to be put into cold sleep. In order to continue working efficiently on the systems which would preserve their lives, the technicians had to be shielded from additional tension.

“But there we were on the job, and all of a sudden, we’d been rescued while we were asleep,” Voor, one of the Gurnsan cooks, complained in her gentle voice. “There was no time for us to get used to the new circumstances.”

“No interval of adjustment, do you mean?” Lunzie asked.

“That’s right,” a human chef put in. “To be knocked out and stored like unwanted baggage - it isn’t the way to treat sentient beings.”

Perkin and the other heads of Engineering defended the captain’s actions.

“Not at all. For the sake of general peace of mind, hysteria had to be stifled,” Perkin insisted. “I wouldn’t have been able to concentrate. At least cryo-sleep isn’t fatal.”

“It might as well have been! Life and death - my life and death - taken out of my hands.”

Lunzie pounced on that remark. “It sounds like you don’t resent the cold sleep as much as you do the order to take it.”

“Well ...” The chef pondered the suggestion. “I suppose if the captain had asked for volunteers, I probably would have offered. I like to get along.”

Captain Wynline cleared his throat. “In that case, Koberly, I apologise. I’m only human, and I was under a good deal of strain, too. I ask for your forgiveness.”

There was a general outburst of protest. Many of the others shouted Koberly down, but a few agreed pugnaciously that Wynline owed them an apology.

“Does that satisfy you, Koberly?” Lunzie asked, encouragingly.

The chef shrugged and looked down at the floor. “I guess so. Next time, let me volunteer first, huh?”

Wynline nodded gravely. “You have my word.”

“Now, what’s this about our not getting paid for our down time?” Chibor asked the captain.

Wynline was almost automatically on the defensive. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but since the ship was treated as lost, the Paraden Company feels that the employees aboard her were needlessly risking their lives. Only the crew who were picked up with the escape pods were given compensatory pay. Our employment was terminated on the day the insurance company paid off the Destiny Calls.”

There was a loud outcry over that. “They can’t do that to us!” Koberly protested. “We should be getting ten years back pay!”