by A. C. Ellas
Nick only smiled. “We’ll see you at nineteen hundred hours. Dismissed.”
Chapter Ten
Dark Star was almost halfway home. Three jumps were complete, and five jumps remained until he reached Hevetich. The fourth jump was nearly upon them, the hardpoint loomed, and Cai was in the Chamber, linked via psi and Synde to the massive spaceship that was also himself. Hundreds of years ago a theoretical physicist had proposed using psi to penetrate where instrumentation could not go, namely into the dark heart of the singularity. Telepathy had proven the best psionic talent for the task, which still seemed odd to most, including Cai. He wasn’t sure why telepathy and not telekinesis was the talent required to manipulate a black hole, but his life and career hinged upon that fact.
The elegant, complex equations of faster-than-light travel consumed his attention. He slowed his perception of time, turning seconds into minutes to solve them before he reached the point of the jump itself. The solutions arrived at, Cai reached into the dark heart of the Dark Star and twisted that untwistable something in the singularity. The Dark Star fell out of normal space and into subspace, fell and continued to fall, sliding down an inverted gravity slope. Cai dodged perceived obstacles, whether real or imaginary none could say, then leaped over the gap between star systems, seeking and finding the edge of the system linked to his exit point by the stresses of the galaxy, the local group, and the supercluster Laniakea.
He climbed a grade that was agreeably shallow and, upon reaching the heliopause, retwisted the untwistable and emerged into normal space exactly where he wanted to be. He was running with full dampeners—that was standard operating protocol these days—and so should be invisible to everything but the naked eye. Not even the energies of the jump itself would light up the instruments used to detect such things, the Corps had found a way to dampen and disguise those emissions, too.
If Dark Star had a fault, it was that the ship was so massive that it took every erg of power Cai had to jump the ship. He arrived in normal space drained of power with only the basic emergency systems operating on stored battery power. Cai drew on the three massive fusion reactors and pumped their energy output through the ship’s systems, the ship soaked the power up like water into a sponge. Slowly, everything came back online. It would take nearly five minutes, an eternity in Cai’s mind, to bring the Dark Star completely back online.
He didn’t have five minutes. Distinct points of sharp pain stabbed his right side, nearly a dozen impacts all at once. He focused, saw the immediate threat of a second wave of missiles and the further threat of a half-dozen enemy ships.
Alarms were screaming ship-wide, the bridge crew was insisting that everyone get to their battle stations now, now, now, as Cai took direct control of the necessary, but still unmanned, guns and fired a counter-barrage at the incoming missiles. He would ponder the impossibility of the attack later, for now, he focused on surviving the fight. They were six to his one: one larger Rel sphere, about five kilometers across, and five smaller spheres ranging in size from three kilometers down to a mere one kilometer in diameter.
“Shoot to disable,” Nick ordered across the shipnet. There was a sudden, incredulous silence across the normally noisy network as if the entire crew were trying to process that command and failing. The acknowledgments filtered in as the crew switched over to battle conditions.
“You can’t be serious?” Cai asked on their private channel.
“I’m as serious as a heart attack. I want to capture them, not destroy them. They detected us, and we need to know how.”
“Very well, Captain,” Cai replied. At the same time as he was speaking to Nick, he also turned his attention to his adjuncts. “Battle drill,” he pulsed to the group mind. Two of six adjuncts immediately dropped out of the network, Tri-ess and Fo-vi, the two he could most spare in a firefight. They would tend to his physical needs and then rejoin the group.
While all of this was going on, Cai continued his counter-barrage against the Rel ships, only relinquishing direct control of the guns when their gunners arrived to take over. The guns were one of the few battle stations that required the crew to physically move into position because the guns could only be controlled by a direct connection to a gunner or by Cai. As each gunner came online, they connected to the navnet as well as the shipnet, becoming a part of Cai’s group mind, but without the depth of feedback he shared with the adjuncts. Orders flew from him to the gunners like nerve impulses from the brain to the hand, and he sensed the status of the gunners and the guns they controlled as if they were appendages of his body.
With the arrival of his gunners, Cai was able to turn the bulk of his attention from defense to studying the Rel ships to determine how best to disable them. Requests pinged against his consciousness, he briefly focused on the source—his pilots were ready to launch. He pulsed Nick as he gave the clearance and initiated the launch sequence.
Fighter craft shot out of Dark Star from shielded ports like bullets from a gun. The electromagnets that propelled the fighters down the launch tubes would give them an initial velocity of a hundred meters per second relative to Dark Star. After that, the fighters would have to use their engines to produce thrust and their attitude jets to maneuver. Like the gunners, the pilots were part of Cai’s navnet. Both pilots and gunners were augmented past the wiring the Corps gave to all its officers. They had enough neurologics within them to require Synde, though not at the dosages Cai required.
The only exceptions to that were his two Rovani gunners. They weren’t wired past a data port, they weren’t part of the navnet, and Cai found his attention returning to them frequently—but for no reason. They were superb gunners, and their lack of linkage to the navnet actually boosted their utility because they acted independently of Cai, acquiring targets on their own. He had purposefully placed them on opposite sides of the ship to take advantage of their uniqueness. But their absence from the navnet was something he noticed, like a tongue probing at a sore tooth to see if it still hurt.
Nick was pulsing instructions at him now, and he passed those orders on to the gunners and the pilots, targeting them at the specific places Nick identified. He maneuvered as well, turning and repositioning Dark Star to prevent the Rels from encircling him. They were many to his one, and although they scored hits upon him, he far outgunned them. Their destruction was only a matter of time—except he wasn’t allowed to destroy them, and that restriction chafed even as the two smallest Rel ships ceased firing upon him.
Cai continued targeting the larger enemies’ guns and missile tubes, but he watched the smaller two to see if they had anything left to offer. Because of this, he immediately noticed their change in aspect. “Captain, the small pair are fleeing.”
“Disable their drives,” Nick responded.
Cai sent the targeting data to the closest gunners and turned most of his attention back to the main fight. Shortly, the two smallest Rel ships stopped accelerating, their drives disabled. At that point, they were nothing but obstacles to navigate around as the firefight continued with the remaining three Rels. A third Rel stopped firing, leaving only the two largest in the fight.
Something prickled across the back of Cai’s neck, some sense of something being amiss. He turned his attention to the smallest Rel and felt more than saw a blurring, a distortion. Without pausing to analyze further, he slowed his perception of time to a near stop, dangerously close to his own limits, pushing his systems and his adjuncts harder than he’d ever done before. He entered the number storm, furiously calculating the jump that would save them. Distantly he heard Nick calling to him; he shunted the contact aside.
There wasn’t time. He needed more time. Nanoseconds became minutes, and still, he feared it wasn’t enough. He arrived at a solution, it wasn’t elegant, it wasn’t perfect, his variance would be horrendous, but it would have to do. He reached into his singularity and twisted it, dropping into subspace in the same instant as the shockwave of the Rel’s exploding singu
larity turned physics upside down and inside out. Dark Star was flung outward as the shockwave distorted subspace, and Cai did his best to surf that tsunami, riding the crest of it and praying they landed somewhere real.
The first thing he was aware of was pain. Everything hurt. He centered himself and took stock, cataloging his aches and pains as a means of coping with them. The muscles of his legs were cramped and knotted, his lower back felt strained, wrenched. His ribs ached, it hurt to take a deep breath. His head didn’t bear thinking about. He opened his eyes to slits and studied the soothing pale blue of his bedroom’s ceiling. So, he was not still in the Chamber, which was where his last conscious memory placed him.
“Astrogator,” purred a familiar, soothing voice. A cool hand touched his forehead, the pain in his head receded.
“Xieri?” He blinked at the young Rovani healer, wondering why and how Xiereko was there.
“The captain summoned me,” Xieri explained. “You were in bad shape, and your adjuncts weren’t in any condition to take care of you either.”
“Where are we?” Cai rasped, surprising himself with the urgency he felt.
“We were hoping you could tell us,” Nick replied dryly from the other side of the bed. “We’re somewhere in real space. Recovery teams are working in shifts to dissolve the gravity foam. What in the hell hit us?”
“A white hole,” Cai said, remembering. “The Rel, it somehow inverted its singularity, releasing all that energy, all that mass, all at once...” he shuddered.
“Relax, Astrogator.” Xieri touched him again, and he felt his body relaxing.
A quiet time passed where Cai studied the ceiling dreamily, and Xieri systematically worked to speed his healing process. Cai could feel the energies Xieri was directing, entering his tissues, helping the cells repairs themselves. After a while, he started to feed power to the Rovani, enabling the healer to do far more than he normally would be able to. At last, Xieri stood back. Cai felt much better than he had, and he was grateful to Nick for thinking of summoning Xiereko. He met Nick’s worried gaze, smiled, and said, “Thank you, my dear.”
Xieri cleared his throat. “You need to eat—soon. Sugar in fluids just isn’t enough for your metabolism.”
Cai reached up and absently patted Xieri’s hand. “Thank you for helping me.”
Xieri smiled at him. “My pleasure, Astrogator. Thank you for the assist.”
“You’ve been fed power before?” Cai had noticed how smoothly, how easily Xieri had managed to incorporate and use his energy.
Xieri shrugged. “We were trained by the Psion Squad, what was left of it, anyhow.”
Cai had heard something along those lines from the others. All Rovania had some psionic talent, it had been designed into them from the beginning. He sat up and stretched then glanced at Xieri. “May I get out of bed?”
“Yes. Let me remove that IV first.” Xieri smoothly clamped the line, removed the little plastic catheter from Cai’s vein, and healed the wound as he withdrew it, leaving smooth skin in his wake, without any evidence of there having been a puncture there just moments before.
“Impressive,” Nick said mildly. He’d come around the bed and now stood on the other side of Cai. He got a hand under Cai’s elbow and assisted him to stand.
Xieri stepped back, nodding in satisfaction. “With your permission, I would like to check on your adjuncts.”
“I would appreciate that, but we should eat first,” Cai replied. “After that, I can help you to heal them if they need it.”
Xieri inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Yes, Astrogator.”
Nick shot the young Rovani a glance and pursed his lips. “Sometimes I get the impression you Rovania are just substituting titles for a different word.”
“Sometimes, we are.”
Chapter Eleven
Nick strolled through what Cai had jokingly dubbed the grand ballroom when they’d first seen it. It was an apt description for the immense chamber, large enough to hold their entire crew with room to spare. There were floor-to-ceiling viewscreens on three of the bulkheads, food and drink service bars on the fourth. There was a raised stage in one corner, and the sound and lighting systems were top notch.
The crew needed to unwind after the intense battle and their near death. The clean-up of the gravity foam was complete, and repairs were well underway. Cai needed another day to recover before Chambering, and so, Nick had declared a ship-wide party to give everyone their needed release and to keep Cai from going back into the Chamber too soon.
The party had started slowly, but that hadn’t lasted. He knew that Cai had been practicing violin with some of the crew, but he hadn’t realized how good they were until the whole group of them claimed the stage and started to play. The group was mixed, human and Rovania, and their music was eclectic, but it all had the sort of driving beat that got toes tapping and bodies dancing.
The Rovania who weren’t playing immediately set to demonstrate why so many of their species had been used in dance teams back when they were still slaves. Oh, my, can they dance. Nick could hardly keep his eyes off them, and he wasn’t the only one with that particular problem. The Rovania didn’t seem to care. Anyone who got too close was grabbed and whirled into their dance. Before long, there were so many bodies dancing it was hard to see the individual Rovania scattered among them.
Nick found one Rovani who wasn’t dancing. Lytario was seated at one of the tables set along the edges of the dance floor, and Evie was with him. They appeared to be having an intense discussion. He claimed a seat beside them. “Enjoying the party?”
Evie blinked at him. “Uhm, what?”
Nick felt his lips twitching. “The party. Are you enjoying it?”
“Oh. Yes.” Evie smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, Nick.”
Lyto refilled Evie’s glass from the pitcher then offered some to Nick. “Tea?”
“Sure.”
Lyto poured him a glass and slid it over.
“What were the two of you discussing so intensely that you ceased to notice the party raging about you?” He sampled the tea. It was very flavorful, but he didn’t recognize the blend.
“Tree intelligence,” Lyto replied. “The way the trees used chemicals, it was like language. There’s precedent for it on Earth but not like we saw on Cerebus.”
“Oak trees,” Nick mused as he put the glass down. “If one tree is attacked by insects, it sends out a chemical signal that causes all the other oaks in range to release a chemical that the insects don’t like.”
“Yes, Captain,” Lyto replied, inclining his head. “But these trees have a much more sophisticated array of chemical signals, so much so that it really does border on language.”
“Proving it, though, that’s the challenge,” Evie added. “And then, there’s the question of sentience, even possibly intelligence.”
“Intelligent trees?” Nick shook his head. “That planet should be interdicted.”
“It should be studied,” Evie countered. “C’mon, Nicky. You can’t tell me the idea of intelligent trees doesn’t intrigue you.”
“Intelligent, hostile trees,” Nick corrected then he relented and grinned at his sister. “Of course it intrigues me.” He drank some more tea, swishing it around in his mouth as he wondered what was in it. He yielded the challenge. “Good tea. What’s in it?”
“Black tea, mint, catnip, and honey.” Lyto smiled slyly.
“Catnip?” Nick raised his eyebrows. “Doesn’t that—”
“Yes,” Lyto replied before he could finish asking. “It does affect us.”
“Hey, Lyto.” Tsandriko padded over and dropped into an empty chair. He was panting.
“Captain.” Tsandraki joined his brother. He was panting, too.
“You two okay?” Evie asked, frowning. Lyto was pouring two more glasses of tea.
“Just hot,” Raki told her.
“We can’t sweat,” Riko added. They both accepted glasses
of tea from Lyto and murmured their thanks before draining their glasses in a single go.
Lyto snorted and refilled their glasses. “You might have overdone it on the dancefloor.”
“How could we not dance?” Riko waved a hand airily. He sipped at the refill. Already, his panting was easing off.
Raki nodded. “Zora was our grandmother.”
“You’re only a quarter Chrazo. And you look like Nathizos. Specifically, you both look like Tachero.” Lyto cocked his head at them, smirking openly as if expecting them to challenge his statement.
“Except our eyes,” Raki said, shrugging.
“We got Zora’s eyes from our father,” Riko smirked back at Lyto. “We got her dancing ability, too.”
“And his fighting ability.” Raki grinned. “Though they’re much the same, I think. Dancing and fighting.”
“Which his?” Lyto demanded. “Yeri or Taco?” He winked at Evie and Nick.
Nick raised his eyebrows and glanced at the twins, both of whom were now glaring at Lyto.
“As everyone knows,” Riko said firmly, “Tachero was the greatest Rovani fighter to ever live.”
“No.” Raki’s flat disagreement drew a sharp breath of surprise from Nick. He’d never once heard the twins disagree about anything until now. “Yeraki was the better fighter,” Raki continued.
“Taco was the only undefeated Rovani gladiator ever,” Riko snapped. “Yeri lost his first fight.”
“Yeri survived two hundred and twenty death matches—twice the number of death matches Taco fought in. And he earned a championship in five fewer years!”
“It wasn’t Taco’s fault his owner was cautious. If Taco had been in that many death matches, he’d have won that many, too.”
“You can’t know that,” Raki growled.
Nick glanced from one to the other, noting the flaring nostrils, raised spinal ridges, and the hints of extension of claw and fang. He wondered if the pair were about to go at it, and if so, if he should interfere or just stay the hell out of their way.
