Backflow Boxed Set

by F P Adriani

  Devin was walking faster than Cambridge and I were, so I took advantage of this more private moment to ask Cambridge if he still felt all right with becoming a permanent part of the Monument.

  His dark eyes jerked back at me—in surprise. “Captain, I thought it was a given that we were staying. If you don’t mind my saying, I know I don’t know you very long, but, from Day One, you’ve always seemed like you were here to stay.”

  My mouth curled at him, but not in a frowning way. “We may have only recently met, but it seems you know me well…. I’ve still gotta consider all of you, though. You were so disappointed when the Keepers wouldn’t tell you more about your son.”

  Cambridge frowned a little, seeming to consider my words. But then he quickly said, “It isn’t all bad: at least I know Peter’s alive. At least I have that now, which is more than I had before.” We were walking into one of the Monument’s tube-cars. “I do wonder about Chen though. He seems unhappy now after what happened on the bridge.”

  My head whipped toward Cambridge; my mouth fell open a little. “What do you mean—what happened?”

  Cambridge’s eyes seemed to suddenly expand in his brown face. He finally flushed a deep red. “Oh—you don’t know then. I—well, you should ask him.”

  I did ask him: he was there on the forward bridge when I finally walked onto it with Devin. Gary, Shirley and Babs were there too, and Babs looked the happiest I’d seen her since Kostas had died.

  A part of me felt so happy seeing my crew on the bridge; it felt like our very-familiar bridge set-up, even though it was inside a not-very-familiar place. However, this not-very-familiar place had indeed grown on me, the newness of it all, the exposure to so many unique scenarios. I felt like an explorer of the galaxy now, not like a shipper of goods in the galaxy….

  Chen was at his usual spot when Devin and I walked near him, but I told Chen I wanted to talk to him alone in the rest-room.

  He followed me inside there, and not for the first time since I’d been back on the Monument, I noticed that he was having difficulty looking me in the eye. “What’s going on?” I asked bluntly now. “Cambridge told me you’re upset. I can see you’re upset.”

  Chen’s dark eyes whipped right up to mine now. “It’s all my fault what happened to you. You could have been killed!”

  “Chen, what the hell are you talking about—”

  “My arm,” he said now. “Claudius got control of it somehow. Thura said the rogue Keeper may have been forced to help there. I weakened the cloaking on the transporter stream Kostas was using to pull you in from the Krin-sphere.” Chen’s dark eyes looked wavy now, as if he wanted to cry. “It was terrible, Lydia. I could see my arm there on the bridge panel, but I couldn’t make my arm do what I wanted. It was like someone else’s brain was stuck inside it. Devin told me that I don’t have a Keeper brain, so I can’t work at blocking out any intrusions. Having this thing—” he shot his Keeper arm up at the air “—is a liability for this ship, for us, from the Demeter. I want to get my arm removed and reattached—Thura told me they can probably grow something normal for me—”

  I grabbed onto him and his “bad” arm. “Don’t you dare do this for me. What are you thinking? I’m the captain; I’m supposed to take most of the risk. Let the Keepers work on coming up with some other solution to the problems you’re having with your arm. You didn’t do a damn thing to me. It was all that scumbag Claudius. He could have gotten hold of anybody and used that to harm any of us! He’s a crazy person with a god-complex.” I squeezed Chen’s arm harder. He was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt, but I still somehow felt the strange shifting of his skin beneath the material. “I want my old friend back—his mind. I don’t care what his arm is. Can you bring that old Chen back—the one I can depend on to fly not only my ship straight, but me too?”

  Chen’s startled-looking lips twitched for a long moment. Then he finally said, “Yes, Captain!”

  “Yes, Lydia,” I corrected. Then I pulled him into a hug.

  *

  When we walked back onto the forward bridge a moment later, Devin was walking off it; I followed him, saying that I wanted to talk to him. He stopped beneath one of the clear upper bridges.

  “I’ve been thinking about my device,” I said then, lifting up my new one. “Not this one you left for me—I mean my old one, the one I lost. If Claudius got hold of it when he kidnapped me, I’m pretty sure he would have mentioned it and demanded to know what that did too. So I don’t think he ever had it.”

  “Let’s hope he never has,” Devin said.

  But then if Claudius had never had my device, who knew where the damn thing was and what could be done with it if someone ever found it? I didn’t say that to Devin now, however, because something about my interaction with the second Claudius on the viewscreen popped into my head instead: I remembered that his surprise at seeing me still alive seemed genuine. I wondered if he’d been unable to track me anymore since I’d gotten lost in The Error Universe.

  “Do you think it did something to change me?” I asked Devin now.

  He nodded at me rapidly. “It’s quite possible. But we’re still working on masking you and your crew more effectively, so Claudius can’t find you again by however he tracked you the first time. We will be putting stronger personal cloaking features on the worksuits especially.”

  “You know,” I said, pointing at one of my dark-red sleeves, “I think it’s past time for you to install weapons on these worksuits.”

  Devin frowned at me heavily. “The Keepers are barely trusted as it is.”

  “Well, I’m not a Keeper, and neither are you.”

  “But I—we’re representing them. This ship has weapons. That is enough.”

  “Not if we get kidnapped again!”

  Devin’s dark eyes turned distant. “Maybe we need to work on a better emergency transporter that we humans can always mentally access in an extreme emergency, even without a chip inside us. I’ll discuss this with the Keepers.”

  “That would be great,” I said on a smile. But my smile soon faded. “I’ve been thinking more about my and my crew’s permanence on here. I know you full workers have a mental link with each other through the chips and Keepers, but we don’t necessarily want to hear each other’s private thoughts. We just don’t want to be forced there.

  “I’m sure you know how I—we—feel about being full workers like you. But, we will accept being workers, alone, at most. We don’t want any chips—any Keeper matter or technology inside of us. It’s not that I don’t like the Keepers; I do. I trust them quite a lot too. But, I still want to be me, myself and I while I’m on this ship.”

  I watched Devin’s slow nod. “That seems fair. And Thura has just mind-linked with me and said it is unfair that you do not know the full truth here. Now is the time to explain the crux of the problem, which is the Monument itself.

  “You see, this ship must exist. It was created long ago by ancient Keepers. We do not know exactly how they created it, and we also don’t how to dismantle it. It may not be destroyable. It has some self-sustaining systems; when they are damaged, they self-repair. The other parts where we must live—those parts we have added on over the ages, and they need intentional upkeep.

  “‘Pure energy’ is a group term for the basic energy of the fluid the Omniverse actually is—many years ago on Earth, people claimed an ‘ether’ existed around the Earth. They were quite right overall; they just didn’t have the specifics to reinforce their claim. And later human science seemed to disprove those claims. But it seems the Omniverse is essentially an energy fluid—as is evident from phenomena like gravitational waves. Pure energy is inside everything, including inside us, but it is normally in an inaccessible state, residing separate from normal energy.

  “There’s probably an infinite supply of pure energy available in the Omniverse because of the nature of the omnifluid, especially if the Omniverse keeps growing or expanding. Pure-energy forms normally cannot be converted
into other forms directly and as easily as normal energy. Pure energy can only be accessed via certain technologies; then the energy can be used to do work.

  “For example, in order to maintain themselves and then move a ship, the firestones access pure energy from their surroundings and from other parts of the Omniverse where the densest pure energy is, and the wells apparently access even more of that energy.

  “We think the core of this ship also accesses this, but the core is unreachable to us now; it probably contains massive amounts of pure energy—which the Monument can convert to other forms perfectly and easily—you may have noticed that its parts can also change so easily, like with the staircase near the battery-charger area. This ability is partly our programming and partly a product of the ship’s being constructed with pure energy. We current-day Keepers can use pure energy too, like when we disassociate matter and use the resultant forms of pure energy to create omnivelocities—we can also use pure energy directly from space, and the worksuits and our other devices can access it from various scenarios too. However, we cannot use pure energy very efficiently in all of those cases and the losses that occur probably wind up in The Error Universe.

  “However, the ancient Keepers apparently figured out how to harness pure energy with perfect efficiency to keep this ship in existence in perpetuity. They never documented their process anywhere though, maybe because they were afraid of all the power that knowledge would provide.

  “For all of these reasons and more, we Keepers must always have good individuals whom we trust running the Monument and watching over it, because it might always be around the Omniverse. As you can probably see now, the Monument is extremely powerful, maybe the most powerful single technological creation in the Omniverse.”

  As Devin had spoken, my mouth had dropped open and my hands had begun shaking at my sides. “You’ve complained before about species creating very dangerous technologies, and here you’ve gone and done the same—and then you expect us to keep that going and keep it out of even more dangerous hands—talk about pressure!” I finished, in a truly flabbergasted voice now. I felt red-hot color filling my face. “We only barely understand this ship compared to you crowd.”

  “You don’t need to know how a machine works in order to use it,” Devin said. “But knowing how it works would help you use it more efficiently—if someday you had to do it all on your own, without the Keepers. We’re confident that you and your crew will learn how the Monument works, inside and out, as much as anyone can, including the Keepers, just as you and your crew have learned with your own ship. Your technological acuity is at an extremely high level. And familiarity, close contact—that eventually breeds understanding. It is ultimately the way of the Omniverse.”

  *

  When I stepped onto the forward bridge again a little later, my head was spinning with the information Devin had finally shared with me, information a part of me wished I had been given sooner. But, better late than never, and all that….

  Gary was standing on the right side of the bridge now, behind Shirley. He looked at me and jerked a thumb toward the back of the bridge. “Devin said before that we can handle flying to Rintu on our own. I think we can too. Do you, Captain?”

  “Of course,” I said, and I meant it. I was smiling as I took my spot at the front of the bridge. My smile widened at Gary on my right, and there was a familiar, sharp twinkle in his eyes, as if he wanted to kiss me. It would have to wait till later….

  “I’m finishing entering the numbers of the omnivelocity profile to Rintu,” Chen said now. “The computer likes the path I’ve chosen.” Chen’s voice had sounded a little shaky, but when I turned my head toward behind me and flashed a grin at him, he smiled back at me—with his normal, open Chen smile, the one that reached his eyes.

  Near him, Babs was busy typing something at her controls, and there was a small smile on her face too. On my right, a serious-faced Shirley was sliding a lever to help test something in one of the room-engines; she was coordinating the test with Steve. In the dining room earlier, Babs told me the tension between Shirley and Steve had calmed down, and they’d begun spending more time together. Babs also told me that Geena had given up on anything romantic happening with Jim, and it hadn’t been that difficult for her to do so when she was so busy—and happy—with her new duties.

  There seemed to be so many opportunities out in the Omniverse now, so many new things for everyone to explore, but there were also so many new dangers.

  I thought of Babs and Kostas again and how people in space normally didn’t tend to forge tight bonds; life out here was just too precarious. Even the bond Gary and I now had, Chen and May, the one Shirley and Steve were developing—they were all probably even more at risk now.

  However, it seems you can’t change the nature of what an animal has been molded to be by living; people will naturally form bonds with each other. And I would have to make sure that my crew remembered that we would have much more than our personal relationships to be aware of in future on this city-ship. Each of us needed to be able to survive on our own just in case we found ourselves alone someday—alone whether through the loss of a partner, or alone in understanding something others could not, or by being physically stranded alone in another dimension.

  More chaos had been thrown into the mix of me and my crew, but, as we steered the Monument through the vastness of the Omniverse, I couldn’t help smiling a little at the opportunities for discovery all the chaos out there might create.

  About F. P. Adriani

  I have an academic background in engineering and science, and a degree in space science in part. For years I worked as a scientific copy editor for a nonfiction publishing house, but now I spend my days—and too many late nights—trying to solve fictional “what if” problems. I’ve written 19 novels and many shorter works; I’ve been writing for over 25 years.

  The Backflow books are part of my Diamond Universe. Other works in that universe are: Hellscape, Endland, Destinations and Captain’s Choice, and Diamond On Your Radar.