“Okay, too much at once.” Trish stepped back from the console.
“Yeah, that’s a lot to sort through if you don’t have something specific in mind,” Electra said. “How about we get your hair done?”
“I shaved my legs this morning and now they’re hairy,” Trish said, allowing herself to be guided by Electra. “Have I been asleep?”
“Sort of.”
“For how long?”
“Three hundred years, give or take.”
“So, it’s 2299?”
“A little later than that,” Electra said. “By your measurement of time… Ivy, what year would it be on Earth according to the Canadian calendar?”
“The year 4211, springtime I believe, Miss Electra.”
“Who is that British lady?” Trish whipped her head around to locate the source of Ivy’s voice.
“That’s the ship’s virtual intelligence,” Electra said. “She’s an advanced computer program, not a person.”
“Is everyone I know dead or were others grabbed and put to sleep too?”
Electra scrunched her nose, trying to decide how to explain things. “No, not exactly, on either question, but that’s only because they probably never existed.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Trish demanded. “Who are you, anyway?”
“I’m Electra Rex, starship captain and treasure hunter extraordinaire,” Electra exaggerated. “Freelance, of course. I’m my own woman.”
“I’m Trish Miller,” Trish said.
“I know,” Electra said. “But please don’t make me call you that. Trish doesn’t translate correctly and it sounds like the Gromphra word for a beast of burden’s unwashed scrotum. Is there literally anything else I could call you?”
“What about Treasure? It’s my DJ name,” Trish said.
“Treasure… That’s perfect.” Electra guided Treasure to the side of the Spatronic pod. “Treasure, let me introduce you to heaven. It’s the most advanced grooming, pampering, wonder-inducing machine ever created, and you’re free to use it as much as you like.”
“It looks like a weird tanning bed,” Treasure said.
“What’s a tanning bed?”
“It makes you tanner.”
“That’s an odd thing for a bed to do, but whatever. I’m sure it could turn you tan or blue or whatever other color you might fancy,” Electra said. “Here… I’ll set up things for you. There are fifty thousand available profile slots, and I’ve only used about a hundred of them. You had dreadlocks before. Do you want those back?”
“Yes, please,” Treasure said. “And I don’t want to be blue.”
“No skin dyes, gotcha,” Electra said. “Body hair? Makeup? Teeth cleaning? Any preferences on those?”
“Sure, all or none or whatever,” Treasure said. “Why am I monumentally valuable?”
“Um…because your name is Treasure, and treasure is inherently valuable?” Electra stalled.
“The huge robot, Letterman, he said I was monumentally valuable and so I had to be within regulations for sentient species.”
“Blabbermouth, bastard bot…” Electra grumbled while she copied over the base preferences from her primary profile, swapping out the hair styling to dreadlocks and adjusting the makeup to scanned matching rather than her personalized choices. “Because you’re one of three humans left in known space and you’re a woman…” Electra said, only realizing her potential mistake partway through the answer. She guided Treasure to recline inside the Spatronic and tried to change the subject. “The process works better if you’re nude, for a lot of obvious reasons.”
Treasure handed out the robe once she was inside. “But you’re a woman”—her eyes went wide when she looked at Electra from the lower angle—“with a dick.”
“That would be a noticeable difference between me and you,” Electra said, shutting the lid on Treasure. “Pun intended, maybe. Have fun in there!”
Electra walked away cursing Letterman’s bungling, her own lack of planning in the impulsive heist and the fuzzy feeling in her brain caused by being around Treasure. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. A fifty percent increase in the human population was sitting inside the Spatronic getting the beauty treatment of a lifetime. That was all that mattered. She no longer had to carry the mantle of humankind after finding Bort—or womankind after finding Treasure.
“Miss Electra, there are two ships on long range scanners at this system’s wormhole spawn point,” Ivy said.
“Full stop, Ivy, stop, stop, stop!” Electra ran for the cockpit, nearly colliding with Letterman on the way. “I need to yell at you later, you careless bucket of…” She was in the captain’s chair before she could figure out how to finish the insult hurled at Letterman, and he was too far away to hear it anymore anyway.
The scans displayed two Glott raider vessels that looked like a series of triangles overlapping each other. They were smaller and faster than the brig Sempa captained, but larger and more dangerous than the dart-like skiffs she’d barreled past in the tunnel. The Glott pirate captain had covered all the angles. Maybe he didn’t entirely suck at his job. There wasn’t another wormhole spawn point anywhere in the system. It would take weeks to use the FTL engines to get to another one and cost a fortune in fuel—if Letterman would even allow that, considering she’d blow well past the default point on her debt repayments.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Electra muttered while she thought.
“If I may, Miss Electra,” Ivy said. “They cannot destroy your ship at this point.”
“You’re right! Sempa knows I have at least one human on board now, if he believed me when I said I was human, and he thinks I have several others,” Electra agreed. “His crew wouldn’t risk blowing up tens of billions of units to block a wormhole. How fast can we go while still getting the wormhole open in time?”
“Possibly fast enough to prevent a magno-snare from latching on, Miss Electra,” Ivy said. “Would you like me to calculate the probabilities?”
“No time.”
“I can run the numbers in less than fifteen nanoseconds, Miss Electra.”
“That’s too long. Turn the repulse engines to max and go as fast as possible,” Electra said. “If they want Treasure, they’re going to have to catch me first.” Electra plotted out five more wormhole spawns along a winding route that she could get to easily after passing from one. If they were going to take her, it wouldn’t even be in the same quadrant of the galaxy.
She stomped the acceleration pedal to the floor and charged the wormhole spawn. The two Glott raider vessels stood ready for her approach but didn’t appear to anticipate her speed. The swirling gateway opened, and two glowing blue beams emanated from the ships. One caught partially, but the Cadillux broke free and shot into the tunnel of the temporal fold.
“They’ve followed us through, Miss Electra,” Ivy said.
“I figured they might.” Electra banked hard, dove through the new zone they’d emerged into and sped toward the next wormhole spawn she’d plotted. It might take several jumps to get a large enough lead on them for what she intended. She was faster than the raider vessels in straight-ahead speed. She had to be, otherwise what was the point of the Cadillux’s huge engines? Plus, the pirates probably weren’t in debt up to their eyeballs to pay for their ships. Desperation and quality alone had to give her an insurmountable advantage—or so she hoped.
The next wormhole opened a split second before the Cadillux shot through. Blue beams from the raider vessels tried to catch her at the rim of the rift, but she was already safely inside the swirling temporal tube before they connected. The third open sector had three wormhole spawns near each other. She sped toward the farthest in hopes of putting enough distance between them for her gambit. The blue beams were well behind by the time she made the portal.
Immediately on the other side of the wormhole, Electra slammed on the brakes, pulled directly up and spun around to head straight back down. The two raider vessels emerged from the wormho
le. She shot between them. The repulse engines bounced off the repulse fields sent out by the smaller raider vessels and sent both ships spiraling off in opposite directions. Electra pulled up just in time to slip into the wormhole they’d exited before it closed.
On the other side, she jumped into the second wormhole spawn, into another and another before she was satisfied that the empty scans were accurate, that she’d truly lost the raiders. Only then did she plot a new course to Station 51 by hand—a long, rambling route that no sane starship captain would bother taking.
“That course will take fifteen hours, Miss Electra,” Ivy complained. “Please allow me to plot a less circuitous route.”
“Don’t touch it or skip on the circular detours.” Electra reclined and let out a long, ragged sigh, pressing the heels of her palms against her closed eyes. That particular bit of piloting had induced far more terror than she should have liked and not nearly enough adrenaline. If nothing else, she’d need the fifteen hours to regain her stomach for high-risk flying.
“I didn’t catch all of what just happened,” Treasure said from behind the captain’s chair, “but it seems like I might owe you.”
Electra spun in the chair to look at Treasure. Her black hair was in the beautiful, long tendrils of dreadlocks again, her mocha skin gleamed and her curves swelled the front and sides of the green silk robe in alluring ways. The fuzzy feeling in her head redoubled and a stirring between her legs told her that her brain wasn’t the only part struggling with the situation.
“Do you like coffee and donuts?” Electra asked.
Chapter Seven
There wasn’t much on the galactic net to help Treasure understand where she’d come from. A random Amphio doctoral candidate conducting low-level sociological research didn’t get a lot of press, leaving Electra to fill in the massive gaps with whatever help Ivy could provide. Treasure finally abandoned the notion that she might be dreaming but held on to the suspicion that she might be in a secret government experiment like in one of the comic books she enjoyed. Something about an adamantium skeleton and the Yukon… Electra didn’t follow any of Treasure’s cultural references, and she used a lot of them. That theory dwindled quickly the more advanced technology Electra showed her.
“From what Paul said, I think you’re a clone,” Electra began.
“Like Dolly the sheep?”
“Maybe?”
“A clone of who?” Treasure asked.
“He didn’t specify.”
“The cloning facility used by most bioresearch firms was created and later disbanded by the Chamber, Miss Electra,” Ivy explained. “The clones used in Paul’s research appear to have originated from there.”
“The Chamber is the government?” Treasure asked.
“More or less,” Electra said. “Planets and regions have their own officials, but the Chamber is in charge of all the big stuff and a lot of the little things. They created the implant that translates everything. It was part of their galactic peace initiative from a million years ago or something.”
“Seventeen hundred ninety-one years ago, Miss Electra.”
“Galactic peace,” Treasure snorted.
Electra grinned and shrugged.
“Seriously?”
“I mean, it’s not perfect, but large-scale wars don’t happen anymore,” Electra said.
“So the Chamber is a good thing?”
“Yeah, kinda, sorta, I guess. They’re more of a neutral thing that is productive on some things and absent on others,” Electra said. “Once they got the galaxy running smoothly, they’ve mostly tinkered. It’s been a long time since they did anything huge like galactic peace. For example, the cloning facility you came from was outlawed long before I was born and may not have accomplished much. Ivy, how long was the cloning facility even open?”
“Nine years, two months and eleven days, Miss Electra,” Ivy said. “Earth standard time scale for Miss Treasure’s benefit.”
“See? Like that,” Electra said. “They thought cloning of sentient species was a good idea for less than a decade, changed their minds and pulled the plug. Or maybe they figured out that the galaxy only needed nine years of sentient cloning for some other master plan they understand but aren’t telling anyone about. Most of what they do now doesn’t have a huge net effect that anyone can deduce. Stuff just works.”
“But where do they come from?” Treasure asked.
“No clue.”
“Who are they?”
“Haven’t the foggiest.”
“Where do they live?”
Electra shrugged.
“Ivy, do you know the answers?” Treasure asked, looking up.
“You don’t have to look up,” Electra said. “That’s the closest speaker to you, but her sensors are all around.”
“Miss Electra’s glib statements and noncommittal gestures are largely correct in what is known for certain regarding the Chamber,” Ivy said. “Any further information I could provide would be minutia fit only for esoteric musings and discussions on galactic net forums. Would you like the minutia, Miss Treasure? There are over five million pages of theory available on the galactic net attempting to explain the nature of the Chamber.”
“No, thank you,” Treasure said.
“It’s a lot to take in, but there are some easy things to hang on to,” Electra said.
“Earth is gone.”
“Yes, but we’re trying to fix it.”
“People are gone.”
“Most of us, yeah,” Electra said. “As far as I know, it’s you, me and a guy named Bort from Mars. You’ll meet him later. He’s… I don’t know him really, but he seems adventurous, maybe?”
“Bort?” Treasure asked.
“I pulled him off a derelict ship a little bit ago,” Electra said. “He’s waiting on a station in orbit around Earth to get the whole rebuilding thing going.”
“And you’re trying to help?”
Electra smiled as best she could. “Yep.” It wasn’t a pure lie. She was helping for money, but she figured she was doing a pretty good job considering she’d found two humans already when there weren’t supposed to be any.
“If I was made in a lab, couldn’t they just make more of me?” Treasure asked.
“As much as I might like having a bunch of you running around, I don’t think that’ll work. Short answer? No. Long answer? Maybe, but it’d require a reliable source of diverse DNA, an astronomical amount of money and for the Chamber to change their mind about outlawing sentient species cloning,” Electra said. “At the moment, we’ve got none of those things.”
“Okay, and what am I supposed to be doing?”
“Honestly, whatever you feel like at the moment,” Electra said with a shrug. “Taking you out of the lab wasn’t part of anyone’s plan, nobody is expecting you anywhere and I’m not sure you’re even officially supposed to exist. For the moment, try to relax and get your bearings.” Again, it was all mostly true, since half-truths were as familiar to Electra as breathing. Primarily, she was wondering if she’d made a mistake in taking it on faith that she was the last human, simply because everyone seemed to believe she was.
For the remaining lengthy hours of the scatterbrained trip to Station 51, designed to perfection by Electra to hopefully thwart pirate pursuit, Treasure explored the ship a little, but mostly sat with Ivy, wandering the galactic net, trying to wrap her head around the enormity of her new situation.
Electra napped, spent time in the Spatronic and had small, but mostly manageable, anxiety attacks about how much money she still owed, the pirates chasing her and the fact that she was lying to Treasure an awful lot for someone she’d just met. Electra had a fifty-billion-unit commodity onboard her ship, which almost anyone would kill to get. That was stressful. The commodity was a person—a really nice, intelligent, adorable person—and that meant if Electra were to turn in the commodity for the money, she would knowingly be selling a person, which was beyond messed up. Sure, she’d fetched, delivere
d and sold the Bort Pod, but she hadn’t known that it contained a guy, and she was starting to think that information had been withheld on purpose. Her single, barely believable, rationalization to ameliorate the guilt was that she’d rescued Bort from a much worse situation to deliver him to a better life, and that was what she told herself she was being paid for. If she didn’t think too hard about it, the justification served as validation for the otherwise-despicable thing she’d unknowingly done.
But that didn’t work for Treasure. Rescuing someone from dissection was an almost unimaginably easy and benevolent choice to make. Selling said rescued person into a form of slavery would definitely be so evil that any other action would be irrelevant. No, fuck it, fuck no. Treasure stayed unless she chose to become part of Bi-MARP of her own free will, at which point the money would be Treasure’s to do with as she wished. Electra couldn’t become the type of person who would do such a thing, not even for fifty billion units. The fact that Bi-MARP wanted a potentially forced breeding program for tourism purposes was such a trivial secondary ethical conundrum that Electra threw it in with the ‘not selling a person’ thing as simply something she wouldn’t knowingly do.
Electra knew she wasn’t a good Embarker or even a decent person most of the time. She was lazy, careless, overly sexual, indulged in too many drugs too often, a little greedy and spent almost all of her time on frivolous pursuits like pleasure and comfort. If her Embarker parents could see what their daughter had become, they would never stop throwing up from rage and embarrassment. But they couldn’t see her, and that was what had made her lifestyle to that point seem okay. That had all changed when Treasure had come on board. She could see, judge and know that Electra wasn’t great, not even good, barely okay at times. And that was scary.
“We’ve arrived, Miss Electra,” Ivy’s most soothing intonation said, snapping Electra out of her intense, internal moralistic debate.
Electra always came back to reality poorly, no matter how long she’d been gone. The lights in the bedroom rose at a reasonable pace to keep track of sensitivity in her eyes. She loved the Cadillux and was beginning to believe the ship loved her back. It got her in a way no person or item ever had.
Electra Rex Page 7
