by F P Adriani
Smiling now, I unstrapped from my chair, stood up and moved toward the pilot’s panel, to make a more direct adjustment there; however, in the space of an instant, everything got turned upside-down once again as I was flung onto the floor by the force of something striking the Demeter extremely hard.
“Lydia!” Gary yelled as he began rushing away from his station.
I shook a hand at him, stopping him in his tracks. “No—stay there—what the fuck was that!”
“We’ve been hit,” Karen shouted. “It’s that ship again—Claudius!”
“Shit!” I said, rushing to get up from the floor. I threw myself at Chen’s red chair and slid inside it, my hands scrambling to strap myself in. I pounded at the intercom on Chen’s panel. “Everyone get strapped in—we’re under attack—again! Steve, ready the cannons!” My heart hammering inside my chest, I clicked off the ship-wide broadcasting, my eyes finally locking onto the menacing green warship on the front viewscreen. I said to Gary now, “He must have been waiting around here for us, goddammit.”
“Other people know where the cloud is and that the stones are linked with Rintu. That’s how we knew where to go, too,” Gary said. Then the frown on his face deepened. “As bad as that jolt was, it would have been a lot worse considering the power of what he hit us with. My improvements have been holding, but if he keeps hitting us….”
As if Claudius wanted to prove Gary’s statement, on the viewscreen, another of his red, comet-like pulses flew from his ship toward the Demeter’s ass.
“More incoming!” Steve shouted.
My head whipped toward Gary. “Respond, Gary!”
“I’m on it,” Gary said fast.
And on the pilot’s panel in front of me, I saw both the force of a second hit on my ship and the force of my ship’s aft pulse cannon explosively releasing its contents; the Demeter jerked forward from the reaction force of that combined with the force from the warship’s second blow.
I was pushed around hard in my chair, and it felt as if the room were suddenly spinning around me. My eyes struggled to remain on the panel in front of me and read the numbers there. “We’ve got too much torque around the long axis!” I finally shouted.
“I’m on it. At least the cannon worked and we hit the fucking bastard,” Gary said, his voice sounding really strained.
Gary and Steve quickly got us flying more evenly again, but I could see on my panel and on the viewscreen that Claudius’ ship had only barely been damaged by my blast and had subsequently sped up, so it had lost no ground behind me.
I was about to tell Steve to start a locked curon bubble, pronto, when I saw the pilot’s panel flash that there was a message coming in.
Automatically I pounded the communications-line open—then I spat, “What the fuck do you want, you psycho.”
“You know exactly what I want,” Claudius said in his smooth, accented way.
“Hey, scumbag, for your information, I don’t have the fucking stone anymore.”
There was an obvious, quite long pause. “Well, that is unfortunate,” he finally said, in a less smooth voice. “Nevertheless, you’re very knowledgeable on this matter now, and that makes you and your ship equal in value to the stone.”
I sat there with my lips trembling, because…he was right. I saw now how naive I had been earlier: there was no escape for me and my crew. Claudius probably wasn’t the only one in the galaxy after the firestones, and who knew if he told anyone else about my having possessed one. And now word might get out that I had been in contact with Rintu. Hadn’t I kind of admitted as much when I said I no longer have the stone? But then what else could I have said or done? I was stuck being fucked here somehow, no matter what I said or did, no matter what happened next.
At the same time, once again I saw that Claudius probably had to keep me and my ship and crew alive to get all of the information he wanted.
But, if nothing else, at least this time I was more prepared for the danger.
“Scumbag,” I said in an angry voice now, “I’m not going down without a fight.”
“As you wish,” Claudius said, firing at us again an instant later, except this time, as I had been talking to him, Steve and Gary had readied the aft cannon again, and with their second blast, they managed to intercept Claudius’ pulse and interfere with its trajectory.
“Yes!” I shouted as the pulses met and exploded in a white sphere of fast-moving waves and particles between the two ships.
But, though my ship hadn’t been affected by the forces of the blasts, neither had Claudius’ ship been affected. He recovered quickly from my interference and shot two more pulses my way. One missed my ship but the other struck toward the Demeter’s back again, along the starboard side. I heard the massive shake of my ship’s hull, and then May shouted over the intercom that the cargo-bay wall had cracked and damaged some of the cargo.
“Get out of there!” I shouted at her. “I don’t give a shit about the cargo!”
“Captain—” Chen’s voice “—we’re coming up there.”
“Hurry!” I said. I hadn’t even known Chen was down there, but I hoped he didn’t break his other arm on the way up here. I was about to tell him to just get strapped into one of the hall wall-straps when I thought of something else.
My head shot in Gary’s direction. “Even with your damping modifications, how long can we last with that ship pounding at us?”
“Not long,” Steve’s deep voice cut in. “And now I can’t safely make a curon bubble: there’s been damage to the heat exchangers inside the beam engine. The first shot somehow got into Nozzle 2 and—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish his response, but then his response soon became irrelevant: Claudius fired at us again, and now there was yet another hit to that same damn aft nozzle, only this was the worst hit that nozzle had ever taken; I could feel the immense damage done as it shook the ship, sending the strongest single wave of vibration through the ship’s chassis I’d ever felt in all the years I’d been flying it.
“Holy shit!” someone practically screamed. Steve. “We just lost most of the nozzle.”
“No! Goddammit!” Blood was pounding in my face, and my mouth gaped in shock. “This psycho’s gonna kill us all. What the hell can we really do?” My head spun around toward Gary, and I could see the sharp light of fear brightening his brown eyes.
I turned back around and looked up at the dark-green ship looming on one corner of the viewscreen. Then I said, “There’s no choice: I’ve got to go over there.”
“No!” Gary shouted. “Are you crazy? We’ve got the cannon ready to go again!”
“What good is that? We damage him and then he damages us worse. We can’t win that dance.” I pressed two fingers on the panel-button to open the line with Claudius again, but only an instant after I did that, I noticed a sphere of brightness in the corner of the viewscreen, where the warship was.
I switched the camera view to put that brightness in the center of the screen, and that was when I saw the massive, dark, irregularly shaped silhouette rising behind the green warship as if it were a whale rising above a tiny dinghy. The dark shape had a familiar, jagged edge on top, and the whole structure was so huge and had appeared so quickly that it could have only come from one place: Rintu.
My mouth dropped open; it seemed that a chunk of the planet’s buildings had been lifted right off from the surface.
Kostas’ firm voice suddenly began echoing louder than ever throughout my ship. “We are The Keepers Of The Tasui. We have just run a complete scan of you and your ship, Claudius Fentimani. There is zero probability that you could defeat us in battle. There would be no battle. There would be instant death, for you.
“We have locked your ship into a gravity field. You have two options: you can either wisely leave this layer right away when we remove this lock on you, or else we will annihilate you. If your ship or crew ever unwisely return to this layer in future, the instant you cross this layer’s boundary, you will b
e given the same two options.”
There was a long pause now, during which Gary and I breathed hard in each other’s direction.
Then I heard my communication-controls beeping; Claudius was contacting me again. I opened the line.
“I accept these…terms,” Claudius said, a sneer behind the last word. “I will leave now. But I am sure we will meet again, Captain Zarro.”
I watched his ship finally slide away from the Keeper-ship, then quickly initiate what looked like a curon bubble: a silvery field of curves and spires grew to surround the warship’s green shell, and then an instant later, Claudius and everything he represented was gone.
Unfortunately, he’d left behind a mess. For me.
“Your ship has sustained severe damage,” Kostas said now.
“No shit,” I replied. “My ship is half in pieces.” I felt on the verge of an angry explosion of expletives—and tears.
“The damage can be fixed,” Kostas said.
“Easy for you to say!” I shot back. “The closest space station is days away—like we can even make it there this year when we can’t create a bubble or travel at high enough speeds to an exit flume when we’re missing a nozzle and our center of mass is screwed up—”
“I meant,” Kostas said, “that we can fix your ship.”
My lips were twitching, in surprise, though they really shouldn’t have been.
“Allow us to do the work,” Kostas said.
I nodded and when I realized she couldn’t see my nod, I was about to speak—but of course she had seen my nod somehow.
“We will begin the work at once,” she said.
As I had been speaking with Kostas, my crew had been talking back and forth over the intercom system—Steve, Karen and Gary, and several others had been contacting each other from different parts of the Demeter as they assessed any interior damage especially. However, all of their chatter suddenly stopped; there was a change on the city-ship on my viewscreen and probably on all of the other viewscreens on the Demeter: a deep, matte-black hole on the Keeper ship suddenly appeared. Spots of flickering light soon dotted the black, which bright spots increased in size as they soared closer to the Demeter, before finally turning into familiar silhouettes.
I enlarged the camera view and watched the sparkling Keepers soaring through the cosmos toward my ship.
Then I said the most obvious thing: “But you’re not wearing spacesuits.”
“You know that The Keepers are not human,” Kostas said.
I grunted, and then my eyes remained locked on the strange, mobile, constantly altering bodies flying through space toward the Demeter.
I switched to viewing from the Demeter’s central aft cameras as the Keeper bodies flew in an arc toward the aft area. The Keepers didn’t even have any equipment with them—oh. A narrow yellow beam suddenly appeared; it was coming from their ship, and now my eyes remained fixed on both the viewscreen and on my panel as the sensor numbers on the aft damage slowly began changing.
I said to engineering, “How’d you like to have that tool to use on this ship? You could spend half your working time jerking off instead.”
I heard laughter coming over the line. “You took the words right out of my head,” Steve said.
I was smiling as I clicked off with engineering and clicked to elsewhere. “Chen, where are you?”
“I’m right outside the bridge door. What the hell happened?”
“Everything happened,” I said, turning toward the open doorway. “Be glad you didn’t have to witness it from up here.”
Chen and May rushed onto the bridge. She was holding his good hand and arm, and my eyes roamed over the silvery, robotic-looking forearm cast The Keepers had attached to his bad arm.
“I’m glad you’re both all right,” I said to Chen and May now.
“So are we!” May said, her dark eyes opening wide at me. “But we lost some of the Keron cargo—”
I shook my head at her. “Nothing we can do about it now, unless The Keepers can fix it, but I don’t want to bother them with that. There are more important things.” I clicked the intercom for Steve again. “How’s the beam engine?”
“It’s going to take a few hours to replace some joints in the heat exchangers,” Steve said. “They got fried by a chain reaction from the warship’s pulse. It’s a good thing we didn’t get fried in here.”
“You’re certainly right about that.” My heart was still pounding hard. I thought of The Keepers again. “Kostas, why the hell didn’t you help us from the get-go—you must have been monitoring outside the cloud that you showed up at all.”
“Yes, we had been monitoring there, including monitoring you, but we do not maintain a policing presence beyond the cloud. We had observed Claudius’ ship enter this layer twice over the last week. But he left not long after. Today, he must have been waiting inside a curon space. We only left the cloud because he fired on your ship. It took us time to prime one of the city’s engines and get here.”
“That was incredible—I had no idea your cities had spaceflight capability.” I frowned heavily now, looking over at Gary, who actually gave me a thumbs-up, though not with respect to my frown.
He said fast now, “The sensors are showing an almost complete re-attachment of the original nozzle material at the break in the nozzle.”
“Great,” I said, smiling at him. But then my frown quickly came back. In so many ways, I just didn’t see much to smile about, especially because I suddenly realized that Claudius would probably think I was even more valuable, now that The Keepers had come to my rescue.
“Kostas, are you there still?” I asked in a loud voice.
“Yes,” Kostas said.
“I’m never going to be safe again from Claudius. What the hell will I do from now on?”
“I believe you will be fine,” Kostas said, her voice firm and sure.
Chen had just walked up to me as I sat up straighter in his chair. And now I said to Kostas, “Oh, you believe it, so therefore it is true? I know people like Claudius; you, apparently, do not. Or the human part of you has forgotten his kind: he will not give up! And who knows who else he told about all this?”
“He may tell whoever he wants. He will have no evidence. The universe is full of myths, and many of them could never be proven to be true. But even if someone found a way to try to verify them someday, many of those myths would only turn out to have been false.”
“But, Kostas, he does have evidence—from this whole encounter. Obviously, I’m not letting some asshole thugs push me out of my lifestyle and the business I’ve built up. I’ll still be out here. But, I really hate that things will have to change now. Maybe I should have changed them sooner. Maybe I’ve been too naive all these years. I guess I was lucky I didn’t have any major problems with criminals sooner. But the galaxy as a whole has been having more problems lately, including with piracy. I should have accounted for this a while ago.
“I’m not a general, but it looks like I’ll have to find one—and I’ll have to purchase some type of weapons-array to outfit this ship more. What choice do I have?
“I’m not gonna let that Claudius asshole turn me into a war-monger. But, forearmed is still forearmed. At least he wouldn’t be able to push the Demeter—and us—around so easily.” I was frowning again. “But, even if I do all of this, what if it isn’t enough? What if he tries again and I can’t succeed against him and people like him? What will you, The Keepers, do for me?”
“We have interfered enough,” Kostas said. “We should not interfere to a further degree.”
“Shouldn’t or won’t?” I replied. “This just isn’t fair: your kind didn’t think this through. You should have been more circumspect—the species out there—they’ve created extremely powerful technologies, and they’re not always cleaning them up! Now humans can access some and can’t turn them off even if they are responsible humans.
“It’s up to you to fix this, not me. I did the responsible thing coming here
and bringing the stone back. Now I get burned even more? Can’t you at least give me some way to contact you if I’m bothered again?”
There was a long pause, during which I sweated badly as I waited for a reply. My crew around me watched the viewscreen, where the Keepers were finishing re-attaching my starboard nozzle, using their beam of yellow…whatever.
The tension in my head was so heavy that it felt like my head would fall down and crush the rest of me. When I could no longer stand waiting to hear back from Kostas, I said loudly, “Well? After everything I just said, you have nothing to say, Kostas?”
“Yes,” Kostas finally said, “I have something to say: we have an idea.”
*
Their idea was: Geena would come back onto the Demeter—and I would accept Jim’s being on here as a part of my crew—or at least that it would be Jim was my idea. Kostas had offered the company of a worker, but given that Geena knew Jim, I figured she might have more insight into him as a human, which might give us more insight to him as a link to The Keepers, too.
I said all of this to Geena; Kostas had done her dimensional-transporting trick and had instantly transported Geena and Jim into the hall outside my bridge. But, at the moment, Jim was down below, taking a look at the cargo-bay damage.
Geena was standing beside me now; Chen was in his seat, doing a little work on his panel with his good arm; May was beside him in the navigator’s seat; Gary had taken a bathroom break—and I was sitting back in my captain’s chair, trying to catch my breath.
Geena stared down at me. “Lydia, I wanted to say thanks—and that I’m really sorry for everything. I feel terrible that I made you feel bad, like I ruined our working relationship. But thank you so much for accepting me back.”
I looked up at her. “Aren’t you sorry to be back?”
Her face flushed. “No! Of course not.”
“But, Geena, you said you wanted to be a Rintu worker.”
“Well, Jim told me I might be able to train for that on here.”
