by Ginger Booth
Did Floki believe that? Yes, he realized, he did. “OK.”
“But I did have another ulterior motive,” Ben admitted. “Talking to Loki is still nerve-wracking. Speaking with you is a pleasure. I would very much like for you to act as our ambassador to the new Loki-plex, Hanging Tree. That’s not a job I can assign you. It’s a personal mission that you might adopt. Trust is earned. Every time it is easier to deal with Floki than Loki, you win clout. With Loki as well as the human worlds. Makes sense?”
“Yes. I see.” And Floki did. “But how do I know that you’re not tricking me again?”
Ben sighed. “I told you my motives. Do you believe them? I told you I want Loki to continue in the Pono rings, and harness all of his vast capabilities to aid humanity and the Colony Corps. Based on the efforts we’re expending, can you see any possible room to doubt me on that score?”
“You don’t trust Loki,” the bird timidly noted.
“True,” Ben allowed. “And he doesn’t trust me. But every time we find common ground, and succeed at something new together, trust grows. If Spaceways succeeds in this transfer – and we will, 99.99% certain – do you agree that trust will grow?”
“Yes. I see. Will your trust in Loki grow?”
Ben laughed. “No! He’ll make me more paranoid than ever! And he’ll be my personal headache. Because who else could stop him running amok? But he’s worth it. Isn’t he?”
“Yes.” His grandsire was magnificent, his potential incalculable for bullet-proofing humanity against the worst space could offer. Did he have further doubts? Floki still wasn’t sure. “Why won’t you let us turn him on again here? Just for a few microseconds?”
The admiral was slow to answer this time. “You know the rational reasons. But I have an irrational one, too. Don’t repeat this to Cope or Remi, please.” They spoke on a private comm line, the engineer not invited to participate. “I believe Loki has a soul. Like Sass has a soul that got mislaid for a time. You as well. I don’t know what happens to that soul if two copies of him exist simultaneously, like what happened to Sass. Whether we’d risk his soul getting caught in limbo. And bringing Loki to Pono without his soul – that worries me.”
“What is a digital soul?” Floki wondered.
“I don’t even know what a human soul is,” Ben admitted. “You tell me. But that’s it. You now know my full set of reasons. Can you approve the archive?”
“Yes,” Floki decided. “And sar? I apologize if I was rude.”
“Not at all. Thank you, crewman. And never hesitate to ask. You have a unique perspective, of great value. Besides, I like you a lot. Especially your neck hugs.”
Floki’s beak curved into a smile. “Even if I don’t give you emu grandchildren?”
Ben laughed aloud again. “Maybe even if you do! I shall abide the challenge. No promises on my husband. But damn, the look on his face would be priceless!” Still chuckling, he signed off.
Floki approved the backup. And all the way back to Merchant, he stood up to Loki’s paranoid, hysterical, freaked-out queries with steely but kind resolve, soothing his fears. While Remi and Wilder kept Nico off his back.
When he finally cut the link with Loki, his beak curved into a silent smile. He was proud of himself for accomplishing his mission. And Admiral Acosta valued his role.
But more, he pictured Ben and Cope accepting emu grandchildren into the brood. Maybe he should iron things out with Nico after all. To become co-parents, if not lovers. What would his own first months have been like, with grandparents, aunt and uncles to spoil him? They’d second-guess Nico about everything.
42
At last the time had come for the migration of the Great Cookie, Loki’s transit to Pono orbit. Only a few weeks late and millions over budget. Ben acknowledged how grossly he’d underestimated this job.
Then again, he was inclined to wing it with a 97% chance of success, not hold out for 99.99%. The Sags ought to cover half of the eye-watering bill. He glanced ruefully to the pilot seat on his bridge, occupied by a pressure-suited Lavelle. They skipped the helmets and finger-frustrating gauntlets, but kept them close at hand.
If the worst that happened today was a Sag sitting in his chair, he’d be astonished. The twenty minute mark pinged. “Comfy?”
“Oui! Do you sell these seats? I like it very much!” He wriggled his butt suggestively in Ben’s chair.
The novice admiral forced himself to ignore the antics. He punched up the control channel, and brought in his principals. One by one, he confirmed they had no further questions, and were ready to go. Floki took the prize for adorable, looking grim in his assigned lead role in pacifying the patient.
Ben had barred his sentient passenger from direct comms with the bridge.
“I don’t suppose there’s any way to sedate Loki?” he asked wistfully.
Floki shook his beak.
“I had a thought,” Ben suggested. “Our records of objects in Pono orbit is…incomplete. But large.” Lavelle snorted amusement beside him. Ben’s lip quirked in agreement. We couldn’t tell you how many rocks are bigger than a rego bus. Or even a head count of the moons. “Maybe Loki could chew on probabilities of what his neighborhood will look like. You know, run projections.”
Floki nodded solemnly. “I’ll suggest the project to him. You’re not sure where he’ll insert?”
Ben nodded. “When we know our radius and speed, we’ll know his orbit. Sort of. In less than half an hour, we shall find out.”
No one else admitted any last minute crises of faith. Clay looked the most nervous, on the helm of Thrive One. Sass, seated in her office near Clay to remote control Loki’s unmanned ships on the cookie, shot Ben a sunny smile. Lavelle’s second at Gossamer’s helm, Martin, appeared taciturn as ever, his engineer Noel Fraser downright eager. Remi, in overall command of the engineering mission, looked almost as green as Clay, especially nervous because Cope refused the role. Cope would handle Merchant’s grav grapples and ship engineering instead. “I have every confidence in you, Remi.”
The engineer nodded slowly. “In you as well, captain.”
“Admiral today.”
“I know who you are. Just don’t drive crazy.”
“Hey!” Lavelle interrupted. “I drive!”
“Merde,” Remi acknowledged with a sneer. The reject pair of aristocrats practiced their rudeness on each other nonstop. Ben just might get used to Sag manners someday, until his next infuriating run-in with their bureaucracy.
Lavelle told Judge to secure pressure hatches, while Ben ran up the engine and brought the warp to standby.
Time. He flicked the switch. Immense whorls of the warp gateway bloomed before him in their ethereal glory. Lavelle crossed himself beside him. Ben couldn’t blame him. Even after all these jumps, he still felt the awe. He’d never opened the gateway so close to any object but a starship before. Merchant stood only three kilometers off the Great Cookie of Loki’s stone suitcase. Yet tendrils of multicolored light frolicked between them.
The instant the pattern stabilized, Ben translated Gossamer, then Thrive One through to Pono’s rings, vanished in a split second apiece. Then he targeted the cookie itself. With such a massive target, Teke believed this would take time. The engineers vetoed a full-scale dry run. They should try this only once. Twice if Ben ran out of time to push through the smaller fuel depot rock.
As the gateway grabbed hold, Ben felt a familiar tingling in his fingers and toes, with a sweet tinkle of bells and a whiff of Schuyler donuts and a swirl of mushroom-floral sari silks. But this time the false sensations persisted, intensified, instead of a fleeting disorientation. A keening built. Only gradually did he realize it was Lavelle beside him, who stared at his fingers in horror.
Ben followed the man’s eyes to those fingers, a blur like time-lapse photography of them moving several centimeters. Well, that’s going to make life difficult. He swallowed, his throat suddenly dry, and studiously avoided inspecting his own hands. He was now the only per
son on his ship familiar with working during the sensory hallucinations of a gateway gone fuzzy.
“Cope, I need more power to the engines. Everything you can give me.” Their current level 8.1 was the max he dared from the bridge. Anything higher required the ship’s engineer to keep a weather eye on the fuel and the drive signature.
“Aye, cap. Is this –?”
“You’re fine, Cope.” He switched channel to Judge. “Please advise all crew that hallucinations are normal. Close your eyes and focus on breathing. Have you heard from Sass yet?”
“Aye, sar. No, sar. On Sass.”
Lavelle’s keening gave way to whimpers. Ben didn’t repeat his advice. He suspected some people struggled to accepted butterflies flapping on their fingers. He took over the helm for the moment, and tried easing the ship backward from the cookie, while holding the gateway focus constant on its target. The faintest flicker on his gateway tell-tale persuaded him to abandon that agenda. If they were drawn through the gateway with the rock, so be it. But even the mere kilometer of extra separation he’d gained felt much better.
Or maybe he was just growing used to seeing his control panel through a flounce of fabric. Irritatingly, his visual on the cookie started to show signs of time-lapse smudge as well. Or no. Maybe that was something real.
Sass fidgeted with her fingers, eyes on the gateway spangled across Pono’s rings before her. Her ship spun, as Clay or the AI targeted rock threats. But the computer compensated to provide a fairly steady view of her charge, the asteroid due to materialize just after her.
But was it her imagination, or was the fractal flower growing slightly smaller? “Clay, Martin, Sass. Maintain constant range to the gateway. Is our velocity diverging?”
“Compensating,” Martin acknowledged.
“Yes,” Clay added, “the gateway…did not accelerate. But now its velocity is 10.31. We came through at 10.14 klick per sec.”
“Interesting.” Sass ran a quick calculation. Its velocity dictated the radius out from Pono at which the new object would orbit. They were at the right distance for the speed Thrive materialized. But, yes, they were a little far out for Hanging Tree’s stable distance. If the Great Cookie emerged at the same speed as the gateway, their location was forty thousand klicks off. That was a lot more moving than they’d hoped, but not beyond the range of scenarios they’d considered.
She glanced back at the gateway, and narrowed her eyes. “Computer, magnify plus ten at my touch.” She tapped a region near the center of the fractal, a lower-density gap in the fronds like the eye of a hurricane. But now a new haze took form, oblong. She searched it eagerly, and yes! She spotted the thumbprint on the cookie in silhouette.
She reached for the ansible. “Judge, Sass. Tell Ben I see the ghost of the cookie.” She reeled off their arrival velocity, plus the new speed at which the cookie was materializing. “Matching velocity. No signal yet to the cookie ships.”
This didn’t actually involve telling Ben anything. Judge manned the ansible in the office on Merchant, but had everything on speaker so that she and Ben could speak in real time like any other channel. He replied, “Good to hear. Stay on it. Let me know any changes. Do not, repeat not, initiate remote control until I release.”
“Aye, Ben,” Sass acknowledged. She steepled her fingers and peered closer. Ever so slowly, the new object grew more distinct. She caught the faintest glimmer of something else, but not materializing slowly like the cookie.
“Thrive, Gossamer,” Martin’s voice broke in. “We are at wrong velocity for this radius band. We’re gaining on rocks. Engineering demands we set up interdiction now.”
They hadn’t planned to do that until the translation completed. But Sass realized this made sense.
“Proceeding,” Clay acknowledged.
“Fraser, Sass,” she cut in, after their current captains were done. “Does that mean you fly the interdiction array while I fly the cookie?” The six outer gun platforms would define a cubic cage around the six inner ships she’d use to steer the asteroid.
The Sag engineer laughed. “Bet I can turn faster than you.”
“No contest.” This should be fun. She notified Ben of the change in plans.
43
Cope shared the engineering podium with Remi by Merchant’s great cargo doors in the hold. Not that John Copeland noticed his surroundings. He tenderly coaxed the star drive up to 8.3, watching the flame of its signature reshape. A faint warble in the pattern caused him to hold his breath momentarily. But the turbulence cleared with the next miniscule increase in power. He sighed in relief.
Leaving those displays open, he flipped in a new one describing the ‘shape’ of the gateway. This rendition bore no relation to the fractal beauty of the thing, but rather its focus in six dimensions. Since a 2d screen couldn’t portray six dimensions, nor the human mind comprehend it, this was drawn as an asterisk with a blob in the middle. His goal was to keep that blob pinned on the cross point without too much amoeba-like protuberance out the arms. Dimension 5 crept outward. He nudged it the tiniest bit, and the appendage receded. Good. Leeway.
“Ben, Cope. Ready to increase power to gateway if you want it.”
“I want. You do it.”
“Applying now…done. Gateway looked stable from here.” A singing choir burst through his focus into consciousness, however. His fingers were losing focus, too. “Experiencing hallucinations.”
“Keep your focus, Cope,” Ben replied. “I know you can.”
Indeed, it was probably Cope’s finest skill. A sheen of sweat broke on his brow from the strain. He almost, but not quite, recognized the choir’s melody. Remi beside him perched on the station stool, head down on folded arms.
A horrible thought struck him. “Are you hallucinating, buddy?” And who’s driving the ship?
“Can’t talk, the dinosaur strip-tease is starting! Ben out.”
“Ha. Ha. Not funny.” Especially because it made the engineer picture a naked dinosaur with all its…parts.
He glanced down at the flame image of the drive signature. It started to hula dance.
Now that wasn’t real. If the star drive did that, Merchant would puff into a golden ball of luminous dust and become one with the cosmic rays. The burst of rationality steadied him. Fuel.
“Joey, Cope. Are you tracking?” No response.
Eyeing Remi uneasily, Cope decided he didn’t trust anybody to handle fueling for him. He unlatched from the podium and jogged to the engine room across a floor which slowly breathed like his husband’s chest in a deep slumber, his boots jarring hard on the inhales. Just a few more pallets into the hopper to feed the outrageous increase in engine output. Then he’d hoof it back. He might be the only one left manning engineering. Sure enough, when he opened the door, he saw Joey draped on a hydroponic rig of cucumber vines, which lovingly molested him with their fruit.
Not real. Fuel.
Floki felt perfectly fine. But Hugo seemed to be talking awfully fast. As usual, the AI team convened in the galley. Tikki joined them because he allowed no one to mess his galley behind his back. Computer nerds consumed snacks voraciously. And ate them as though someone would steal them if they didn’t eat fast enough, judging by the frenetic pace of popcorn crossing Nico’s lips.
On the wall screen, Loki’s image grew partially transparent. His physical dimension that was – the Great Cookie. Floki saw a bright nebula shine through a thinner section. “Grandfather, how are you feeling?” He didn’t speak aloud of course.
No response.
Floki checked his remote tell-tales of the sentient being’s vast processors. But the readings made no sense. Loki’s sky drives read normal power levels – but no output. He found the clock thread, a comforting heartbeat, whose eternal task was to add one to a counter every nanosecond. The process was active. But Loki’s clock was falling behind Floki’s.
“Captain, Floki,” he hailed the bridge. “Loki is offline.” He fed his words into his vocal synthesizer normall
y, but they spat out at a high-pitched chipmunk speed, and he blinked.
Ben squeaked back instantly. “Good-maybe-stasis-how-are-you?”
“I feel fine,” Floki reported. But Nico rose and walked to Tikki’s counter almost instantaneously. The shiny cooler door flashed, a glass was in his hand, and he sat, all seemingly in a half second. While Floki’s attention was diverted, Hugo leaned back. His head now lolled as he gazed at the overhead. “Maybe running slow.”
“Floki?” Nico asked in concern. “Hugo?” His head whiplashed back to check on Tikki. The housekeeper tottered a few steps, and abruptly sat on the kitchen floor, disappearing behind the serving island.
He’d compared weird sensations with the other guys. He’d exaggerated his, because theirs seemed so much more vivid. Now the edges of his vision swam, and the lights seemed to throb in time with his heartbeat. And he smelled his sister cooking broccoli in the deep fryer, a memorable stench. Other than that, his hallucinations didn’t much trouble him.
But Floki, who reported no hallucinations at all, sat frozen, eyes mid-blink, head canted on his sensuously curved neck. Why is his neck turning me on? He shook himself out of that and darted around the table. He reached the bird’s access panel and opened it. Battery level fine, power on, processing light – solid on. That one was supposed to blink, fast for a major processing load, slowly for normal operation, but never constant on. He stood slowly and reached for Hugo’s pulse. The man didn’t rouse, but his breath rose and fell normally. His heart beat slower than Nico’s.
