by F P Adriani
“Well,” I said, standing beside her at the bar now, “at least you’ve got all the data on it from our interaction on the Demeter.”
Babs nodded and finished up her drink, finally wiping her mouth with one of her hands. “I know,” she said, shifting a bit on her barstool. “But, well, I had more aspirations. I thought I was on the brink of discovering something in science; instead, I rediscovered what a pain in the ass science is. You work for years, and then maybe you find out something you and others never knew before. Then ten-minutes later, that something is overturned by new findings, and you’re back to square-one again.” She let out a tired breath, and her head turned my way, as if she were waiting for me to speak.
I did speak: “So, what will you do now? Where are you off to?”
“Where are you off to?” she asked, a curt laugh punctuating her question and making it sound as if her statement had more than one meaning.
I smiled a little. “Things have changed on the ship—I mean, wow, have they changed. It might feel uncomfortable on there for you.”
Babs shook her head from side-to-side. “I’m not sure I’d care, Lydia. It’s surely better than moping around here. I did need a break, but now I need to start working again….” Her brown eyes studied my face. “You keep mysteriously mentioning changes on the ship, but you never say what they are.”
“Well, for one: I got another science person after you took off, damn you, Babs.”
“Shit—you replaced me already!”
I rolled my eyes and clucked my tongue. “Hardly. You two are both great, just in different ways. I think you’re better at discovering; Shirley’s better at any actual exploring. She wound up being more hands-on than I thought. She’s gotten cozier with both Karen and Steve, and I think she leans more toward engineering than science. I’ve got her on the bridge now as a go-between. She fills in the gaps of what Steve and Karen would say, so I don’t bother them every two seconds. Shirley’s still in training somewhat, but, really, she’s doing well.”
“Maybe she can deal with the other crew better than I could, with my tending to be The Bossy Scientist.” Babs was laughing again. “I’m sorry for how that sounds: you know you’re all my people and a part of me never really left.”
“Don’t get all metaphysical-mushy on me now,” I said.
Her quite-hardy laugh erupted again. “How’s good-old Gary? Still stubborn?”
I flashed her ironic eyes. “I don’t see him like that anymore.”
“Yeah, it’s amazing how different people look once they’ve taken off their pants for you.”
I was the one laughing hard now.
Babs straightened against the bar, her legs in her gray pants finally sliding off the bar seat and her smile finally fading. “I guess there’s—well, there’s no place for me there anymore….”
My eyes widened. “Who the hell said that? There will always be a place for you on my ship,” I said, and her smile at me was so wide then, it really was a grin.
“What about more than me?” Babs asked now, her eyes staring off into the distance beside me.
I frowned and said, “What?”
Then I heard someone—a male—say, “I paid off my room, Babs—did you finish with yours? Is this working out?”
I turned my head in the direction of the voice—and spotted Cambridge walking toward me and Babs. There was a lopsided grin on his dark face, and he was wearing a sharply cut gray dress shirt and black pants. He looked really nice, and my mouth dropped open at his being here and not looking so Genteran-official and so Genteran laid-back.
“Cambridge!” I said. I was smiling, but my smile faded as I remembered what he and Babs had just said. My eyes shot back-and-forth between them while I waited for them to say more.
“Captain Zarro,” Cambridge finally said, “how’s the reactor I sold you working out? You were a dream to deal with. The commission I got really helped me—not just financially, but helped me see I was wasting myself on Genteran.”
I didn’t know how to respond to his statement, so I didn’t respond. And his smile faltered.
Babs jerked a thumb his way. “We came here together—or, really, we fled Genteran together. Cambridge has welding experience, you know. He wasn’t always the boss of a bunch of deadheads.”
Cambridge laughed. Then his smile faded and he turned away, toward the bar. “I lost my son years ago. When I started working with Babs, chasing the Ghost, I finally realized I was hiding out on Genteran, hiding from living.” With a flick of his gray-covered wrist, he caught a bartender’s eye. My eyes quickly shifted to Babs, then back to Cambridge as the bartender handed him a small drink.
I finally said to him, “I’m sorry about your son—that must be hard to deal with still.” Cambridge was looking down at his drink, but he nodded slowly now. “About the reactor you sold me,” I continued, “it’s top-notch. But, other things on my ship are different now too.” And those other things were what was still bothering me about permanently taking on any new crew, or even any old crew. Babs was smiling at me, quite eagerly, and now I sighed and decided to be more up-front. “Matt in the cargo bay—I bought two small weapons-arrays from Keron-3, to replace the Demeter’s old tail and nose cannons. Matt helped me choose the arrays, and, fortunately, I haven’t had to actually use them. But, Matt patrols the ship, like now at the station, in the cargo bay and in the hangar….”
“Huh?” Babs asked me, her smile turning into a perplexed twist of her mouth.
“We’ve had problems,” I said now. “There are dangers. There is someone—” I shook my head hard “—well, I don’t want to go into it now, but, suffice it to say, piracy is more of a problem out in space than I thought. And some pirates are more persistent than others.”
“That’s a shame,” Cambridge said, slowly shaking his head and sipping at the drink in his hand. “How can you do business if you’re always worried about someone bothering you?”
I nodded rapidly. “That’s the problem—in a nutshell. I’ll never stop going out here as long as I keep wanting to. But, for months now, things have been changing. I feel like my ship isn’t the same—not to mention the increasing technical problems….”
“Can’t you keep making repairs and replacements?” Cambridge asked.
“Sure—I’m planning on doing an overhaul of the zenite engine by next year. But, everything costs money. I do make good money, but, again, I’ve had to take on even more crew—and now the pie keeps getting split among more people.”
Cambridge waved his free hand at the air. “I’ve saved up for years because all I did was work. I own nothing; I have almost no expenses. I’m not that concerned with money anymore.”
“Neither am I,” Babs said. “I never was, which I think you know, Lydia. Very honestly, the thing is: Cambridge and I have nowhere else to go. That’s our problem, in a nutshell, too.”
*
I didn’t know what to say to Babs and Cambridge about what they seemed to want, and I had to go back to the Cargo Office now. I told the two of them to go to the Demeter, and I said that we’d talk about everything later, over dinner.
My face felt flushed as I moved through the station; I was both hoping what I had to do in the cargo office wouldn’t take too long and yet would take too long. I wanted to delay having to face people; I was particularly worried about disappointing Babs and Cambridge in some way, either by not having them become a permanent part of my crew, or by having them become a permanent part of my crew.
I groaned as I stepped over the threshold to the Cargo Office: I was so tired of having to make so many not-really-choices choices lately.
*
Makron Station could be an annoyingly anal place about their paperwork, so I wound up having to do lots of bullshitting with people and running from office to office in order to finish up with the station, which took longer than I’d planned.
I was finally standing in the middle of Makron’s Space Entry office, feeling out of breath and taking a much-needed d
eep breath, when I got a communication from on my bridge.
My hand went to my red belt’s communicator as I said in a rushed voice: “Yes, Chen?”
“It’s not Chen. It’s Shirley. Captain Lydia, there’s a problem—with Chen!”
*
I moved as fast as I could through the station toward my ship; then I rushed across the hangar and finally up the Demeter’s long ramp, passing between two large red barrels full of coffee beans.
Shirley had been waiting inside the outer cargo-bay hatch, twisting her hands together.
“What do you mean there’s something wrong with his arm?” I said to her in a rush as we charged across the bay now.
Her blue eyes shot my way, and her voice shook when she spoke: “There’s something there—a spot from his elbow downward. He noticed it when he was working at his station. Nellie couldn’t figure out what it was, so she asked Jim to look at him. He’s meeting us there.”
“The goddamn Keepers,” I said, grinding my teeth together. No matter my sudden irritation now, I actually liked the Keepers and saw the importance of the work they did. However, so far, my and my crew’s interactions with the Keepers hadn’t led to anything really good for us, even if our interactions might have helped the universe.
Sometimes I felt as if I’d lost my way as just a business person trying to forge a future based on what I was earning out in space. I wanted a pleasant, mostly fixed-location personal life someday. But, lately, it was looking as if that state would never happen for me; I only rarely got to use my house on Earth, and even more rarely my cottage on Pink. Some days I just felt so damn tired of having to do things for the benefit of others—
I reached my bridge—my eyes immediately falling on Jim’s tall form. He was standing near Chen in his red pilot’s chair and running a small, silver Keeper-device in the air over him. Chen’s face was flushed, and as soon as he spotted me coming his way, he began to jump out of his chair.
Jim silently held down Chen’s right arm and said in a cold way, “I told you not to move.”
“Great bedside manner!” I said as I walked up to Jim.
His gray eyes snapped toward me as he released Chen’s arm. “I’m not a medic.”
“Nooo kidding. But if what’s going on made sense to us humans, Nellie would have fixed it.” Though Nellie had originally been a temporary hire, she wound up being more useful than I’d originally thought she would be; her training as a medic had been quite broad. Still, that training hadn’t prepared her for this—it seemed that no training could when it came to the Keepers….
I was staring down at Chen now; he was wearing a white, short-sleeved shirt, and, below the sleeve on his right arm, where the crease of his elbow to the bottom of his forearm should have been skin-colored, it was now patchy-looking with the color of nothing….
Uh-oh.
Chen’s too-bright brown eyes were right on my eyes as he said in a shaky tone, “Looks familiar, huh?”
My eyes shot up at Jim’s straight face, but he was reading something on his device’s readout.
“What the hell’s going on?” I demanded toward Jim. “What’s happened to him? His arm was supposed to be healed!”
“It is healed,” Jim said in his noncommittal, dull way.
Nellie suddenly walked onto the bridge and right up to Chen. Her flat cheeks looked flatter than ever; in one hand she held a medical scanning device she’d picked up on Keron-3; she pressed her other hand onto Chen’s right shoulder. “Captain,” she said, “I’m sorry I stepped away—had to use the bathroom. But this is my third scan, and the scanner still says part of his arm isn’t there. He’s missing bone cells, muscle tissue, axons—”
I turned hard eyes onto Jim.
And Chen said, “I thought I saw something on my arm when we were on Earth, but then the spot went away and I forgot about it—till before. I was entering the numbers Steve gave me on the fuel status for the engines, and, suddenly, I couldn’t feel part of my arm; then I realized it was sparkling….”
As Chen spoke, my eyes remained on Jim, who finally sighed and lowered his device. “I have sent my scans to Thura on Rintu. She’s done a more complete analysis of my information and has concluded that, somehow, non-human matter has become incorporated into Chen’s appendage.”
“Nooo kidding,” I said to Jim again. “We know that already!”
“Well,” Jim continued in a cold tone, “I’ve also run a scan of your computer’s bio information about Chen—he gave me permission to do this. Chen, I’m now concerned about something you listed on your application here from when you were hired. You were raised on Space Force ships. You injured your arm then, as a small child. There was a gash.”
Chen’s face turned really red, and his lips fell open; they began trembling. “Geez…I totally forgot about that—both the incident and that I listed it when you hired me, Lydia.”
“Where were you when the gash on your arm happened?” Jim asked Chen.
“Hmm…if I remember correctly, my parents were stationed on Starlight Station in The Regal System.”
Jim’s gray eyes jerked to Chen’s brown ones. “The Regal System is an isolated area in The Nebulaic Layer. The Keepers have always avoided The Nebulaic Layer; it contains pockets of strange ‘shiftable’ matter that can combine with organic material and produce unpredictable results—especially when exposed to Keeper genetic material. Unknowingly to you and your human medical people, your gash back then had absorbed some shiftable matter.
“It apparently remained inert for many years. But when you accidentally fell from Rintu and through dimensions unprotected, and then broke your arm, that set up a worse injury than you realized—because it injured your arm on a genetic level, and then your cells reproduced very fast to make repairs, and the shiftable matter got activated. We’re sorry we didn’t detect it when we put on the cast. The matter was buried deep within the inflammation, and we simply weren’t looking for it.”
I was frowning now—and feeling pangs of sympathy-pain in my chest for what was happening to Chen. “But there’s something I still don’t understand: Chen’s broken bone didn’t break through the skin, so how did the Keeper DNA or whatever get incorporated into his anatomy?”
“Oh,” Jim said, “the Keeper cast does indeed mingle with the circulatory system in order to work.”
“Well, that stinks. I mean it’s good that it does because it heals fast, but, duh, you should only use the casts in isolated places, cleaned of Keeper material.”
There was a lopsided twist to Jim’s mouth now. “It’s impossible to ‘clean’ an area of Keeper genetics if the Keepers are around. They can go in and out of the local space, so can any remnants of their skin cells, etcetera. An area may look empty of Keeper matter; then an instant later, the matter’s there.”
“Then maybe we shouldn’t be interacting with each other!” I said in a rush, suddenly realizing that the Keepers could be dangerous to be around, and not liking this realization.
“This is space, as you well know,” Jim said now. “Creatures meeting other creatures, especially from other universes—anything can happen, as we’ve told you. We’re all doing the best we can under unusual circumstances. But it’s too late to turn back the clock on humans and Keepers meeting each other.”
I couldn’t believe what was happening: when the Keepers had put the robotic cast on Chen’s arm, they told him his arm would be whole; they just neglected to tell him his arm wouldn’t be wholly human. Or, were the Keepers just not as powerful as I had thought, and so they couldn’t always see where they might make mistakes?
My lips shook when I spoke again: “What the hell is Chen supposed to do now that you crowd have disabled him?”
“I don’t want parts that might be elsewhere when I don’t know what the hell they’re doing there,” Chen said now, and I could tell by his shaking voice and his lowered head that he was on the verge of tears he was too embarrassed to shed. There were a dozen of us on the bridge now�
��word had spread among the crew about Chen. And I didn’t want him to be embarrassed on top of the physical problem he had to deal with now.
I turned to face most of the others. “I appreciate that you’re concerned about Chen, but we’re still unloading the shipment here, and I know you all have work to do. I’ll—I mean Chen will let you know what’s going on.”
Everyone except Nellie, Shirley, Jim and Chen began leaving the bridge. I smiled at my other crewmembers as they walked away, but as soon as they were gone, my smile collapsed.
When Chen had spoken before, I could see on his face what he was really afraid of, and that was the same thing I was really afraid of: someday, would Chen entirely stop being a human? Would he turn into a Keeper somehow, or some strange mutant of a Keeper? I certainly had no answers to that question, and I wasn’t entirely sure I trusted any answers the Keepers could give us on the issue. It was also possible that they, too, wouldn’t even know the answers to those questions.
Unfortunately, whatever information they did have, Chen and I needed to know it. I turned to Jim and asked him, “How bad will Chen’s arm get? Tell us the truth. Will the foreign matter spread on his body?”
Jim shook his head from side-to-side fast, his short dark hair jerking around. “It won’t spread; it’s not an infection. It was absorbed where there was injury and inflammation.”
Chen’s right hand now pressed against the metal frame of his pilot’s panel. “I don’t know…it feels like it’s affecting my fingers.”
Jim watched Chen flex his hand and then manipulate his panel. “Your fingers are attached to your arm, which is attached to your shoulder, and so on. All of the body’s parts are connected.”
I was angrily grinding my teeth again. “The point is: will it or won’t it debilitate him?” I asked Jim.
But it was Chen who responded: “Actually, Lydia, to be honest, I think my fingers are moving a bit faster.”
My eyebrows shot up.
And Jim said, “That makes perfect sense. The shiftable matter is more responsive and requires less energy expenditure to work. And especially because of the Keeper genetic material, your nervous system will be able to fire faster over the area where your arm is.”
