by F P Adriani
The viewscreen came to life in front of me, though there wasn’t much on it: a bunch of stars on the right, a completely black area on the left.
Kostas continued now: “The Keepers have reserved using this part of the Omniverse for training only. The dimensional streams here are mostly a closed area, so the Monument can go anywhere inside them without concern. Plus, we will keep a very close eye—and hand—on what you’re doing, to help prevent any problems.
“Always remember that omnivelocities also wind up meaning omnilocations. We can wind up anywhere in a planned profile if we unintentionally drop out of motion in that profile, so choose your positive and negative velocities and their ordering carefully, based on the ship’s suggestions—the ship’s computer will always suggest options. If we humans had to do this completely from scratch every time, we’d never get to any actual flying.
“Chen, Gary—I want you to start first: I am sending you the coordinates for a destination. Again, take your time in choosing a profile; refer to your devices, workbooks and suit-readouts for more information if necessary.
“Also remember that the round black buttons on all of the bridge panels are for talking to the Monument’s engine areas. You’re too new to coordinate flight actions with your other crewmembers now, but you may talk to them if it makes you feel more comfortable.”
I pushed the black communicator-button on my panel. “This is Lydia. How are you all doing there—Steve, Karen?”
“Fine, Captain,” Steve said over the link. “I mean, I think. I’m still learning these controls….”
“So are we,” I said on a sigh.
I looked over my right shoulder at Kostas; she arched a dark eyebrow at me.
I turned my head to my left and behind me, where Chen, Gary and Shirley were working on one long console, facing me; Babs was behind them facing a panel against the left side of the bridge. Every one of us was still standing.
“Go now if you’re ready, Chen, Gary,” I said.
“I’m on it,” Gary replied, his fingers punching his panel-buttons.
Looking down at my own panel’s readout, I could see he and Chen had been making adjustments to the numbers of an omnivelocity profile the ship’s computer had suggested. Then Chen finally pushed the blue “GO” button; parts of the consoles were still sporting labels for us….
I watched the front viewscreen…and kept watching it for another moment…for another long moment. There was no change on the screen; apparently, we had gone nowhere.
My face flushed. And when I turned to look at my crew, both Gary’s and Chen’s faces were the definition of “beet red.”
“Shit,” Gary mumbled.
“I thought I did it right,” Chen added.
I heard Kostas sigh. “You’ve forgotten what I said yesterday about the order of your very last actions. You didn’t hit the ‘set up omnivelocity’ button to confirm before you hit GO.”
“Oh duh,” Chen said, and I laughed softly. “We’ll do it again,” Chen added.
He and Gary did try again and—yay!—we moved. I felt a slight twinge of disorientation in my head, and then the screen changed: a foggy, orange color filled the left side of the screen—some light and matter from a nebula, apparently.
Kostas said now, “We are in one of the lowest energy dimensional streams here; navigating this is easy. You will go to one more location inside this area; then we will move to a higher-energy dimensional stream. How to move along the proper path in there isn’t so obvious.”
“Kostas,” I said, “it seems like we’re doing only partial flight steps here in general. It can’t be this simple. There must be more to the process.”
When I glanced over my right shoulder, Kostas was looking at me. “Of course there is. But you are only scratching the surface now. You are still unsure of what your choice will be for the future, aren’t you?”
I nodded at her, but I was thinking that I felt a lot less unsure than she knew. I had really begun to see that the longer I stayed on the Monument, the less I’d probably want to go back to staying on the Demeter only.
I didn’t say any of that to Kostas, however, and then she told me it was my turn to move the Monument.
I worked my controls, and I didn’t have the same problem Chen and Gary had; the ship moved to somewhere new now, only, this time, it didn’t want to stop moving.
“Uh,” Babs said in a warning tone.
“Kostas, we keep jumping to a new spot—we’re not stopping!” I said.
“No kidding,” she replied. “Figure out what to do.”
We did—or Chen did. And the view on the screen rapidly slowed.
“I don’t see how I’m ever going to get the hang of this,” Gary said now.
“We have confidence that you will,” Kostas said in a sure tone to match her statement. “If I and others like me have been able to fly this ship, so should you be able to.”
“But you seem to have a perpetual, worker mind-link with the Keepers. Maybe that helps you understand this ship’s science.” Gary flung a hand at the controls. “To be honest, I’m really feeling overwhelmed here already.”
I heard Chen sigh—in sympathy with Gary. “I thought my arm would give me an advantage, but I still have the same damn human brain. If you expect us to help get us to the warring species, Kostas, how can we make the deadline?” Chen sighed again. “I don’t get the feeling we’re up to it.”
“This is just a start. We don’t expect you to take us all the way to the deadline’s location, but you must have a general idea about how to do that anyway—just in case. I’ve told you what’s at stake. We either do this now, or we risk the framework collapsing.”
“Well,” Chen said, “could your path-library be wrong about that?”
“Of course it can. But we have enough confirmation from other technologies of ours to take this threat seriously. We’ve also checked to make sure that taking action now wouldn’t make things worse, and we’ve confirmed that it would not.”
Chen’s right hand was at his controls again, but his hand wasn’t moving. He did, however, move his head now—to slowly nod at Kostas.
*
The day wore on, and it wasn’t exactly going well. My crew and I on the bridge had a lot of difficulty setting the correct order of omnivelocities for each particular destination, and we screwed up the flight process in some way or another several more times.
I wanted to give up for the day and go rest on the Demeter, but Kostas insisted that we try again. So we did.
With a lot of help from the computer, we worked out a new omnivelocity profile with almost entirely new numbers for a new dimensional stream, but, at the last moment, Gary spotted a mistake and made a quick change right before he pressed GO.
I watched the front viewscreen as we shot into a green-tinted area of space. There were tiny, mint-green globules floating around the Monument—matter from nebulae? I wasn’t sure. Though the readouts on my console-panel were in English, I couldn’t understand most of the science there….
I finally frowned up at the viewscreen and said, “This doesn’t look right.”
“It isn’t right,” Kostas said, and in a quick nervous way, making my head jerk around toward her. “You made an unpredictable, improvised change at the end, Gary, and we Keepers couldn’t compensate fast enough to change our destination to a correct one.”
Gary’s face reddened and sweat dripped down his forehead. He had been sitting on one of the silver console chairs, but now he seemed to shrink farther down into it.
“But it isn’t just you,” Kostas said, her hands working at the bridge-controls. “The ship momentarily gained too much power. Something happened with one of the engines.”
Now my face flushed badly: I hoped my engineering crew wasn’t responsible for that “something happened”….
“I’m not exactly sure how we got here, but we are on the edge of the Sea Nebula in The Barien Layer,” Kostas said fast.
“What?!” Chen al
most screeched. “That’s just a space-flume away from The Reimark Layer.”
It was my turn to screech, “What!” and the room seemed to spin around me.
“Yes,” Kostas said. “We are much too close to there, and we have lost our cloaking. By default, the Monument is naturally cloaked when we’re in motion. The cloaking must be turned off then for it to go off. Yet no one did that—Devin, I’ve suddenly lost the feed to the primary gluon-components room.”
“A problem has developed in the anti-gluon stream there,” Devin said in a rush from inside the engine-controls area. “Thura’s working on it.”
Kostas must have manipulated one of the bridge panels, because the front viewscreen now split into two images: the greenish-looking cosmos filled the right side of the screen, but on the left there was an image of an empty-looking long room with shimmering electronic configurations on the walls; lightning-like strokes of light and matter were rapidly flying from one side of the room to the other, then back again.
Thura suddenly appeared on the screen near the strokes. Her flickering arms grabbed onto one of the lightning blasts—and her whole form suddenly jerked around as if she’d indeed touched a live wire.
“Shit!” I said, my heart going crazy. “Are you all right, Thura!”
Her voice came into the bridge: “I have been jolted with too many fundamental components of matter. I will be what you call ‘sunburned’ for a while.” I could see what she meant: as she spoke, some of her clear parts began turning a reddish hue. “But I have fixed the anti-gluon stream,” she continued. “There should be no more outsized energy surges, and we should be able to leave here in a few hours.”
“Hours!” Gary said from behind me—from right behind me. He’d left his chair and moved away from his console. We flashed each other worried eyes.
“This is my fault,” he said now, in a defeated voice. “I should have just left my mistake as a mistake and not tried to fix it. I’m not used to how instantaneous everything is on here. You told me to be aware of that, Kostas.”
She glanced his way. “It’s not entirely you. The problem with the anti-gluon apparatus would have happened anyway; it just would have been better had it happened while we were somewhere else. I’m working on setting up a temporary cloak, but it won’t be continuous yet, over the whole ship. The Keepers will use their bodies and hand-held devices to make a protective field to fill in the gaps.”
My eyes widened at Gary. Then I asked Kostas, “But won’t others with the ability to detect Keepers be able to detect them now?”
There was a pause before Kostas finally said, “Yes.”
“But” —I sputtered—“but what about Claudius! We could run into him around here—he can see us!”
Kostas’ head shot over her shoulder at me. “The probability of that happening is very low. You’ve got to stop worrying so much, Lydia—second-guessing every action, every new development. Had I known you would become so paranoid and distracted by this, I wouldn’t have told you the whole truth about your path. But I was more concerned with saving you than I was with scaring you.”
I understood what she meant; I often felt the same way toward others. At the same time, I felt embarrassed that Kostas had said I was paranoid—in front of my crew. It was bad enough that I’d been demoted on this mammoth Keeper ship to not being a captain. I didn’t want my crew to lose confidence in me, especially if we went back to business-as-usual on the Demeter someday…though again I saw how that seemed increasingly unlikely. The glow had come off of my ship for me, and I wondered if, someday, I might not want to return to the Demeter, even to sleep….
I thought of my life on there, how I had left some jobs, things and people hanging—like my house on Earth and my place on Pink. And Pete, who only sometimes piloted my ship—his back injury had flared up again, and he was still on Earth now, having medical procedures done—well, I really didn’t know if that was happening “now,” as I’d lost track of how time was passing off of the Monument.
The Demeter’s primary clocks had seemed to keep their usual Earth time, but I couldn’t tell if time was really passing the same way while the Demeter was inside the Monument….
It was becoming even clearer to me that being around the Keepers masked and confused so much, and the only way for me to figure out some things was to ask the Keepers or the workers about those things directly—and hope they would be giving me accurate information in their responses.
I moved closer to Kostas. “Thank you for saving me, but part of my worry is because of the huge loss of control on here—”
“You’ll get more control when you’re ready for it,” Kostas said, her eyes falling on me, then on the rest of my crew. “And I think today has shown that you are all indeed not ready for it.”
I couldn’t help frowning—at the truth of her words.
*
“All training is over for today. All crew back to the Demeter,” I finally said over my belt communicator. I and my crew from the Monument’s bridge had just transported to the hangar, and we were moving up the Demeter’s ramp now.
Kostas had supposedly gone to the Monument’s engine area. She’d told us that we could remain in the bridge rest-room, till we were back flying again, with her and the Keepers doing the flying this time. However, at the moment, I felt safer sitting inside my own ship. The Monument was visible out in space—what if someone saw us? Maybe I could still flee….
When all of my crewmembers were finally on the Demeter, I used the cargo-bay controls to close up the exterior to space specifications. I watched many of my crewmembers rush across the cargo bay and into the rest of the ship.
But I grabbed at Karen as she passed near me. “What about our fuel situation, Karen?” I knew that Steve and Cambridge had patched the forward weapons-array damage as best as they could. But we were still missing the proper supplies for that, and we were still low on other supplies….
May was within earshot of me and Karen. May came closer to us as she said, “Oh—Lydia, I meant to tell you: the Keepers now have fuel for the zenite and curon engines; they removed it from the other human ships they have on here. Do you want me to have them deliver it here?”
My mouth slanted across my face. “Provided we’re okay a few hours from now. I’m not sure if you know, but we’re exposed—the Monument.”
Karen’s blue eyes turned to me. “But, Lydia, before we left the engine area, Devin told us the Keepers temporarily closed up the cloaking field.”
“Well, we were exposed,” I said. “Someone could have detected us then. And it seems the Keepers themselves are helping to make the field. The bottom line is that I’ll feel better once we’re out of here and back in the training area.” I wondered about that area of space. As far as I could tell from my suit readout earlier, the training area really didn’t seem to be inside a defined layer; it seemed to be an area of space composed of normal space and dimensional streams that were unusually similar to each other.
I mentioned that now, and May said, “One of the workers said that whole area would be hard to access with conventional spaceships, so it’s basically a secluded place in space that only the Keepers use.” When May stopped speaking, she began yawning—one of her hands quickly flew to cover her mouth.
I smiled at her a little. “I think we should all just take a break for a while—but at our usual stations, just in case.” My fingers manipulated my belt communicator again. “Geena, you and yours please bring us snacks around the ship.”
*
I spent the next few hours on my bridge with my bridge crew; we ate and talked about what we thought of the Monument, how it compared to flying the Demeter, if we thought we could fly the Monument long term and not fly the Demeter long term….
But that wasn’t exactly what I had planned for us to talk about now; our discussions weren’t what I would call “resting.”
Still, those topics passed the time, and before I knew it, Kostas’ voice was coming into my bridge:
“The problems have passed, Captain Zarro. You can come out of hiding now.”
My face felt really hot. “I wasn’t ‘hiding’. I was trying to be prepared for—for anything. So where are we now?”
“We are out of The Barien Layer and are on our way to our end-destination.”
“No more training then?”
“I didn’t say that. Unfortunately, it will have to be ‘on the job’ training. We were delayed too long by the cube, and we want to make sure we get to where the warring species is well before their war worsens. You and your crew will fly part of the way to there—tomorrow.”
“I can’t wait,” I said, but in a voice that was missing something: enthusiasm.
*
When Gary and I were in my cabin later, sitting back on my bed with our workbooks nearby, I took a look at his wound; the bumpy, darkened texture there had smoothed out quite a bit. As far as I could tell, it was healing nicely.
Gary said the area was a little itchy, and my eyes shot right up to his. “I hope nothing freaky’ll happen, like how Chen got contaminated….”
Gary had picked up his workbook, but now he laid it on the bed as he sighed at me, his breath rustling my hair. His fingers touched the strands, pulling them from one of my cheeks as he said, “Kostas told me that the shiftable matter was responsible for that.”
It was my turn to sigh. I picked up my own workbook, scrolling through the digital pages toward the omnivelocity section, which I had been reading whenever I had any time for reading.
“Every day I still wonder if this is the right decision,” I mumbled.
I could feel Gary’s eyes on my profile.
“What happened on the bridge today didn’t help matters.”
“Don’t remind me,” Gary said. “I feel like an idiot.”
My head shot up to his. “You’re not an idiot. You’re human…. I know Kostas and the other workers can do it, but do you think we’ll be able to do the same when we aren’t workers?”
