Backflow Boxed Set

by F P Adriani

  “Yes,” Shirley said, her voice more somber now, her head turning away from me.

  I let out a quick breath and ran a hand over my hair, smoothing away a strand from my right eye. “So, why don’t you go pack your stuff? Just contact my ship afterward, and one of my crew will be along to help you move whatever you’ve got.”

  “Omigod,” Shirley said as she spun away from me, “I can’t believe I’m doing this!” She began sprinting down the hall outside the hangar, and, laughing loudly now, I watched her dark hair and blue skirt flying behind her running body.

  *

  I continued walking through the station, toward the Records Office; I had to turn in a form containing questions about the cargo workers from the station, about how much time they’d spent loading, about how well (or not) they did, etcetera.

  As I opened the door to the Office and walked in, it suddenly occurred to me that my “stealing” Shirley from the station might piss it off and negate the museum deal I’d cemented via Shirley. Now I felt stupid that I hadn’t thought of that before…but I also knew that I would never be short of work: the galaxy was a constantly busy one, and some places were extremely dependent on imports from far away because their natural environments were nothing like those on Earth, where humans first evolved. Even if I had Ten Lydia Lifetimes, I’d still never run out of jobs to do in the galaxy.

  I shrugged off whether the museum job would actually happen; then I got back to work on this current job.

  *

  Later, when I was almost done in the Records Office, Sam, one of my engineering gophers, contacted me, to tell me that Karen was prepping the beam engine and Steve was on a break. But, Steve wanted to buy something in the station, so he was going to help Shirley bring her stuff to the ship.

  “Where do you want me?” Sam asked me suddenly. Then I lowered the speaker on my belt: one of the Records Office employees was staring at me with shocked eyes, as if Sam’s question meant something sexual.

  I suppressed a laugh at her and told Sam, “Just continue with whatever you’re doing. I’ll be back within the hour—and it looks like we’ll be able to leave in two hours.” I raised an eyebrow at the employee, and she clicked a button on her silver computer, then looked at the computer’s screen and nodded a “yes” at me.

  I left the Records Office and walked down the long hall outside, and as I passed the Cargo Office, my stride slowed; I thought of going in to verify the museum deal…but then I quickly decided against it: Shirley might not have quit yet, and even if she had, once she was back on my ship, I’d just ask her what she thought about the probability of the museum job’s happening now. Or, I’d just contact the station—and the museum—later and see if I was still listed as the shipper….

  I finally turned around the corner of the long hall to the shorter hall outside the hangar where the Demeter was—and, as I turned that corner, I nearly crashed into a guy rushing around the corner.

  He was big and he seemed kind of clumsy, considering he’d almost trampled me. But, he was also dressed nicely in a gray tailored shirt and slim black pants—and, considering he’d just come from the hangar’s hall, maybe he worked at the station….

  “Pardon me,” the guy said now in a deep, smooth voice touched with a rolling accent I couldn’t identify. One of his large hands jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Are you leaving on the Demeter?”

  “Maybe,” I said, thinking fast. He and I were the only ones in the hall, I was unarmed, and my heart was pounding; I had suddenly remembered that the best people didn’t always wind up at this station….

  “I am actually looking for the captain of the Demeter,” the guy said smoothly.

  I straightened up more. Another man had just come out from the hangar and into the hall, and I recognized him as one of the station’s cargo people. As he passed me by, he nodded at me in acknowledgement, and I nodded back.

  Then I turned to the strange big guy and said, “What’s this about? I’m the captain of the Demeter.”

  The man’s dark eyebrows rose and his even darker eyes quickly surveyed my face. “Well then, I have a proposition for you. I heard you have a stone….”

  “A what?” At first, I honestly didn’t realize what he was referring to; then I remembered the firestone, and felt my cheeks begin to color and my hands begin to sweat. I didn’t like the direct way he was looking at my eyes, and I could have sworn I saw some kind of challenge in his. He might look classy on the outside, but his attitude was rude.

  “Excuse me,” I said, turning away from him fast and starting down the hangar’s hall. “I’ve got work to do.”

  “But I’m interested in buying the stone,” the man said, and I could tell from how his voice had loudened and shifted that he had followed me, which was why I quickly clicked on my communicator to broadcast to Matt in my cargo bay.

  I didn’t really have a security team on my ship, but Matt had been a police officer in a Space Force unit, and he worked in my cargo bay partly because he liked doing physical things. It seemed now would be his time to shine….

  “Captain,” came his deep voice over my communicator, “what’s up?”

  I was going to open my mouth and tell him to come to the hall here, but when I glanced over my shoulder now, the hall was empty.

  *

  I walked fast toward the Demeter, passing a few of the station’s loading crew inside the hangar. May was there too, and she was shaking hands with another group of the workers.

  “So is everything done then?” I asked May as I stopped nearby, my voice coming out shaky.

  May’s head swung toward mine. “Yep. And right on time. They did a great job. With all the tonnage we had to move today, I’m surprised we weren’t here till late tonight. No one took a break.”

  “I’m giving you all a bonus then,” I said, my voice steadier this time.

  One of the men from the station thrust a hand out to me as he said, “Right on!”

  I was smiling and lightly laughing as we shook hands, but my eyes drifted to behind him, up to the Demeter’s closed, black cargo-bay hatch.

  “Thanks for the good work,” I finally said to the station worker in front of me, dropping his hand, “but we need to get going soon. I’m sure we’ll be back to this Cardoon again and we’ll see you then.”

  “You bet,” the guy said. Then he waved at me before he and his co-workers moved away.

  “Let’s go, May,” I said fast as I walked toward the Demeter, my booted feet striking the smooth gray floor hard.

  “Lydia, is something wrong?” May asked in an urgent voice as she caught up with me.

  “I just had a weird encounter; it was probably nothing, but I had Matt close the ramp-door.”

  “I see that,” May said.

  I clicked on my communicator—to Chen, who was on the bridge again. “Chen, I need you to run a scan to make sure no one unexpected is on board. Let me and May in now, but no one else—oh shit. I forgot: Steve’s coming back with Shirley. Well, Chen, just make sure when you let them in, no one else comes in.”

  “What, Captain?” Chen asked in a perplexed voice.

  “Just please do it, Chen.”

  “Of course, Captain. It’s just your voice….”

  My voice—which had a shake in it again that I didn’t particularly like—my voice now said, “There was a guy—asking about that stone—”

  “What?” Chen said again.

  The cargo-bay hatch began rising; May and I had almost reached the gray ramp.

  And now I was rushing up it as I said, “I’ll explain more later, Chen. I’m just a little worried here…. Shit. Ugh. I just thought of something again. Chen, I need you to look up some information….”

  *

  “You mean to tell me you hired a stranger on the spot?” Gary said to me, his brown eyebrows rising and his mouth dropping open.

  We were alone in the hallway outside my bridge, and the person we’d been discussing was now being set up in her own ca
bin on the second quarters-deck, which was above the deck where my cabin was.

  “Lydia, I’m shocked,” Gary said now.

  I rolled my eyes to the ceiling and kept them there for a moment. “Shocked about what? She’s as dangerous and untrustworthy as an infant. I trust my mind and feelings, and we immediately hit it off. You met her too—was she scary?”

  Gary sighed hard. “All right—you’re the boss. But don’t you want to research who she is?”

  I looked him right in his brown eyes. “Do you think I’m stupid? I wasn’t going to take off with her aboard without checking on her. I’ve had Chen look her up in Cardoon’s public-records database. She is who she says she is—and Chen sent a text-message to Tryton. We’re just waiting back for a reply. We won’t lift away till we get one.”

  “I just don’t understand: you impulsively let a stranger on here, but you’re worried about a two-second conversation with some guy in a public hall?”

  “Why don’t you believe it was weird?”

  “I do believe it was weird. I want to punch him in his fucking face for scaring you, to be honest. But you’re also letting something some bartender told you during a party upset you.”

  “And what do you think my response should be now—what else should I be doing? We’re leaving, as planned. But I’ve been minus a science person ever since Babs, and now I have one back.”

  In perfect unison, Gary’s eyebrows jerked to higher on his forehead again. “That’s what this is about—Babs? It still bothers you? But I thought—I thought everything was going well on the bridge—”

  “Dammit, Gary, I’m not demoting you. This has zero to do with you. I just think we need more science people on the ship, period. That I found the stone helped bring that home to me. Things come up out here.” I quickly waved my arms around the hall. “Who knows what will happen next?

  “The museum job—it’s something new. Maybe I’ll take on more of those types of jobs; when the crew here is varied in their knowledge, that might expand the kinds of jobs I can take. I do get tired sometimes of feeling like just a truck driver of mechanical shit when there’s so much more out here to do.”

  Sighing again now, Gary ran a hand through his wavy brown hair. “All right—I see your point. And I think it’s a good one.”

  *

  Chen finally gave me a thumbs-up on Shirley’s background on Tryton, so I decided to be up front with her; I hated to put a damper on her seeming exuberance over being on my ship. But, a part of me still wanted to hear her response….

  We were in her cabin now, and she was unpacking her stuff. I quickly told her about the man in the Cardoon hall. Then I said, “So, if I’m wrong about you and you are someone nefarious, I’m telling you right now: I won’t put up with it. I’ll throw you in the brig.”

  She pressed a shaking hand to her chest, which hand was holding white bikini underwear. “Omigod—I’m not here even two seconds and already there’s controversy! You’re still docked—do you want me to just leave?”

  I laughed now. “No. I trust my instincts; I think you’re harmless. I’m just trying to cover myself more.” I grinned at her.

  And she let out a loud relieved breath. “Who do you think the guy was—the one who started you worrying? What was he looking for?”

  Frowning now, I shrugged. “I don’t know what he wanted. He must have overheard something last night and made a bigger deal out of it than it is. There are all kinds of crackpots visiting space stations.”

  “Tell me about it.” Shirley rolled her eyes as she carefully pressed her underwear into a drawer in the room’s silver dresser. But now her arms abruptly stopped moving. “I just thought of something—are we safe on here from crooks?!?”

  I didn’t know how to respond to her question, but that had nothing to do with her: she’d asked what I’d been thinking about since the moment that guy had accosted me. “I have some weapons on here,” I finally said. “But, this isn’t a warship, and if I go around flashing that I have them, it might make the people I do business with think I’m a thug shipping business, which type of businesses do exist….

  “But don’t worry about any of this. You just worry about getting acclimated here. Later you can come on the bridge and I’ll show you around there. For now, I’ve asked Steve and Karen in engineering to train you a bit and make space for you to have an office in one of the rooms near there.

  “Honestly, we should be fine—business-as-usual and all that. I’ve almost never had more than minor problems out in space, and I don’t anticipate I’ll have anything more than that in future.”

  *

  A little later, Chen contacted me to say we’d finally gotten the official Cardoon go-ahead to lift away.

  I left Shirley’s room and went straight to my bridge. Leaving a Cardoon was as meticulous a process as arriving was; we couldn’t start any engine thrusting till we were a safe distance away.

  From in my chair, I watched the front viewscreen as the blue magnetic beam slowly glided us through the opening in the hangar and then into space-black. Gary was on my right, telling me and Chen the numbers on the ship’s movement status.

  In the middle of that, I frowned and said, “Gary, I need you—and Shirley—to take a look at that stone and give me an analysis of it.”

  Gary was busy with the departure, so, at first, he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. He pulled a frown at me; then his eyes finally shifted, in understanding. “Oh—okay. But, right now, I’d rather make sure the beam’s dissipated enough before Steve starts the engines, or else we might get electromagnetic flares along the hull….”

  “Um, yeah,” I said, “I don’t want that.”

  Fortunately, I didn’t get that; both Gary and Steve perfectly executed our disentanglement from the beam, and moments later we were on our way toward the next space flume and layer, and toward our next drop-off on Keron-3.

  *

  The day continued to be a busy one: we now had preparations to make for when we would reach Keron-3, and Shirley had to be set up in her new office, which wasn’t much bigger than a closet and which used to be Steve’s space when Gary was my lead engineer.

  While Steve moved some equipment into Shirley’s new area and began training her on the equipment, I spoke to Gary—about the firestone. I’d removed it from my safe, and Gary had been examining it with several microscope attachments at one of the science ports in engineering.

  That same thing kept bothering me about the stone: how could anything phosphoresce after spending years in the dark? I’d also had the stone in my completely dark safe for hours today, and, again, there had seemingly been no loss of light intensity. This must have been why that bartender had warned me and that other guy had accosted me….

  “So, do you have an explanation yet?” I asked Gary. “Maybe the stone absorbed something else from the junk room, and maybe it’s doing the same thing now?”

  Gary was bent over a long gray microscope extension; he had positioned the fat electronic lens right over the glowing stone. “I can’t see what,” he said now as he straightened up. “It would have to have been concentrated right near the stone, or else the energy would have dissipated too much for the stone to absorb so much. The table it was in hasn’t been connected to electrical power in a long time. The room’s temperature-controlled and it was cold, so the effects of thermal radiation on the stone would be minimal.

  “If the stone somehow did absorb significant energy from the atoms in that table’s structure or wherever, and apparently continued to absorb that energy ad infinitum—that’s not by any mechanism anyone has observed before, as far as I know. That’s what I remember hearing about the stones, like I mentioned in the Cardoon bar: it seems the stones are powered by an unknown energy source. They’ve been tested over the years, researched, but there are so few around for testing—and no progress was made because the stones couldn’t be penetrated.”

  “Then how the hell are we getting energy from them as ph
otons?” I asked.

  “That’s the most baffling part.” Gary’s long fingers reached for the stone and snapped it out of the microscope. His fingertips traced over the stone as he spoke now. “I guess the best description of this is: it’s thermodynamically inert, or maybe thermodynamically impenetrable. There’s the boundary where the solid surface of the stone apparently starts, and there’s the light we can see outside that boundary, emanating from the stone’s direction. But, from our perspective and the perspective of my equipment, nothing is actually crossing the boundary from inside to outside. There’s an effect out here but no cause. Obviously, some energy is coming off it somehow. It’s hitting the exterior and turning into or somehow exciting already existing photons, because our eyes can perceive the stone’s existence. But, still—everything is happening for us outside the stone.

  “Maybe there’s a mechanism of energy transfer across the boundary that we can’t perceive. Energy can’t get into that boundary from out here, but from inside, apparently, some form of energy is getting across and out. It must be a strange form, like the strange mass we make use of—like Lobos mass for inducing an Earth-like gravitational pull on gravity-deficient planets with human colonies.

  “Over the past few hundred years, we’ve documented many anomalies and unexplainable physical interactions in space. This stone may be yet another one.”

  “So,” I said slowly, “if we can keep perceiving the stone while not being able to access it thermodynamically, it seems like it’s completely powered internally, like a perpetual-motion stone. No wonder some people want the stone then.”

  Gary nodded at me fast. “Yeah. All I know is: something is apparently powering it inside; I just don’t know what. Maybe whatever atoms or whatever it’s made of—maybe they’re superefficient energy converters—maybe they actually can absorb from outside. They can immediately take and convert energy from anything, even the air, and convert it to another form that’s usable for the stone. But, there’s no evidence of any unusual energy field, or convection, etcetera, around it. Lydia, I’m just stumped.”