by S. H. Jucha
Looking at Captain Cordova, Alex asked, “Is this why you’re here, Captain?”
“Yes, Ser President, I will ensure our people get home safely, and I would not wish to miss another adventure,” he added, a youthful smile lighting up the aged face.
“Then the Rêveur remains at Idona,” Alex said. “It’s here, Captain, for our people’s safe return and not for touring the solar system.”
“Understood, Ser President,” the captain replied, knowing Alex’s words were meant for many at the table.
About this time, a rushed Franz Cohen hurried into the meeting.
“Ah, Commander, I was waiting for someone to show up about now,” Alex said, and he eyed Terese, who took the opportunity to shrug her shoulders in Alex’s inimitable style and then let loose her own trademark laugh.
“Let me anticipate your request, Commander,” Alex continued. “Yes, you may stay, and four travelers will be at your disposal. I presume you’ve selected your pilots?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Franz replied, “I was waiting to request permission of Commodore Reynard for three other pilots and me, if you approved Ser Lechaux’s request. Am I premature?”
“No, Commander, I think we are in the negotiations stage. And you, Ser Station Director, what is your role in this plot?” Alex asked Nikki.
“Ostensibly, Mr. President, it’s to provide assurance that Idona Station will provide a manufacturing base for the Haraken medical nanites at no charge. However, the thought that some of your people might be outmaneuvering you made it impossible to stay away.” Nikki punctuated her last sentence with a cheeky smile.
“Rebel,” Alex grumbled. “Mickey, you have your flight crew picked? Captain, you have your crew?” In both cases Alex received a nod of acknowledgment.
“So you believe you have it all covered?” Alex said to the room. His question was greeted by satisfied smiles, which slowly waned in the face of Alex’s own smile. He waited, knowing implant comms were burning with questions and reviews of checklists.
“So what did we miss, oh great one?” Terese asked grudgingly.
Alex looked over at the twins, who nodded to him without his asking the question. “Which troopers were asked to stay to provide security?” A short round of expletives greeted his question. “Étienne and Alain have volunteered to stay to manage security, and I’ll have Tatia request volunteers,” Alex said. “You people and the GEN machines are to have around-the-chronometer protection. Now let’s talk about how long this might take.”
The meeting dissolved into the minutiae of UE medical personnel travel, manufacturing, training, and other assorted details. When Alex got ready to leave, he put a hand on Franz’s shoulder and whispered, “Let me know how Reiko likes her first turn in the cockpit of one of our travelers, Commander.”
“Certainly, Mr. President,” Franz agreed, embarrassed at being so easily read.
* * *
Renée took a moment to talk to Reiko before she left the meeting.
“I hear that Franz asked you to return to Haraken with him when he leaves.” Renée said.
“Not much privacy among your people,” Reiko replied, but the wry smile she offered was meant to take the sting out of her remark. “Yes, he did,” she finally admitted. “But, I was serious when I said I wanted this cruiser command to protect this station and your people. It’s important to me.
“And your commitment is appreciated, Reiko,” Renée replied. “I know Alex can think of no one else he would choose to trust the welfare of his people to than you.”
“I did tell Franz that there’s the possibility of getting a ride on the Rêveur when he returns home, but I also said that I wanted a guarantee of a ride back to Sol if things didn’t work out on Haraken,” Reiko said and laughed self-consciously at her words. The idea of leaving with Franz excited and scared her and probably in equal amounts, if she was honest with herself.
“We’ll see you within the year, Reiko,” Renée said, giving the commodore a quick hug.
“You seem sure of your opinion,” Reiko called after Renée.
“Oh, I am. There is a sort of adventuresome woman, who finds a certain type of New Terran male irresistible,” Renée said, adding a conspiratorial wink.
Reiko cracked up, laughing at the thought that the alluring Ser de Guirnon, partner of the president of an alien world, and she might have similar personalities.
* * *
Terese and the Harakens who were supporting her efforts would spend the greater part of the next year at Idona. The Haraken probes made it possible to get the call out to everyone immediately, but a lengthy time was needed to allow the medical teams to journey from the farthest rim across the solar system.
If it weren’t for the tremendous impression Haraken technology already made on the people of Sol, the visiting UE medical personnel wouldn’t have believed the instructions they were receiving. The administration of the medical nanites was simple. More difficult was the pre- and post-surgical procedures required if the individual had artificial material in the body, such as metal implants in the bone. That material would need to be removed before the initial injection, and the patient maintained in a stable position until the nanites repaired the body.
The objections from the doctors were always the same. “We don’t have room to hospitalize our population for long periods of time.” The answers were always the same. “The period we are discussing is at most several hours for the more radical operations, provided nutrients and fluids are immediately supplemented.
It was an important item stressed over and over in training — the need for superior nutrition. The body would require tremendous amounts of calories and nutrients. This would be especially true for those who had been restricted to poor diets, such as the rebels and those people serving life sentences in the corporate and government factories.
Supply of the medical nanites would represent a huge boon for the station. Miners were kept busy procuring the exotic raw minerals Z required, and the station’s sleepovers, restaurants, and shops were constantly filled by medical teams and, of course, visitors, who were anxious for a sight of the Harakens before they left the system.
Terese became a notable personality for her efforts, and it wasn’t long before she realized why Alex preferred not to attract public attention. But for Idona’s visitors, if Terese wasn’t available, a look at the exotic twins or heavy-worlders, such as Franz, was always worth the trip.
Scientists from outer-rim locations made the trip to the station to speak with Z, who good-naturedly entertained their questions. The influence of the Miranda persona did much to balance Z’s replies to their more awkward questions. Most went away shaking their heads in awe. They expected some sort of indication of robotics or hybridization, but after hours of conversation, they couldn’t detect anything but human physiology and responses. Some even suggested that Z might be just an incredibly large heavy-worlder. At which point, Z would often smile and say, “But that’s the purpose of any SADE human avatar, Sers, to have it appear indistinguishable from its intended purpose.”
Idona was inundated by the arrival of so many liners that docks were often unavailable, necessitating the use of shuttles to transport passengers to and from the station. It was not long before Nikki Fowler was able to realize the dream of her great-grandfather, whom she never met. She would have the credits to expand the station.
The great gift Nikki received, although not the one she expected, started with a long conversation with Mickey and Z, who after listening to her ideas volunteered to design the expansion. Nikki spent hours talking about how she thought it should function and appear.
One day when Nikki was asked by Mickey and Z to join them, Nikki anticipated attending another planning session. In Alex’s old planning room, their design slowly revolved in the holo-vid left behind for Z’s use. Nikki was upset that apparently her suggestions were ignored, but the engineer in her began studying the design, and she began asking questions.
&n
bsp; As Nikki was nodding her approval of their achievement, elegant solutions beyond her capabilities, her final question became, “This is nice and all, but can UE technology build this?” When they told her that the detailed plans using UE technology were on her servers under the title, “Nikki’s Dream,” she hugged both of them.
-37-
The leaves of the collector closed around a group of crystals surrounding the brightest and tallest of the specimens. The robotic explorer retracted the collector, tucked it into its rear end, and started working its way back to the moon’s surface. Time was of the essence. The moon, in its elliptical orbit, was making a near approach to the planet, and tidal forces would begin disrupting its surface.
Already the cylindrical explorer was halting, extending its burrowing arms, spinning them at high speed, and reopening the pathway back to the surface, which was slowly closing from the shifting surface.
Sitting on the moon’s surface, three miners, Stremski, Willard, and Lister, were pacing, sweating, and swearing. Their explorer was struggling to reach the surface, and if it failed to reach them in time, they would have to abandon it and the prizes it held in its collector.
The men specialized in locating unusual mineral formations and were exploring deep inside a moon of metal ores covered by a thick layer of frozen gases. It was a risky venture, but Lister had a feeling, and Lister’s intuition was the team’s good luck charm.
Deep crevices in the surface were expanding toward the mining cab when the robot popped up not 200 meters away, having chosen an alternate pathway up. Slapping one another on the back, Stremski piloted the cab over to their exploration tool, Willard snatched it up, and Lister employed the comm to ready their ship, which was maintaining a geosynchronous orbit above their cab.
Once aboard, the men locked down the cab in the ship’s bay, unloaded the collector, and hurried to exit the space, ridding themselves of the planet’s increasing gravitational forces.
Stremski and Willard were in the pilot’s cockpit when Lister yelled to them on the comm. Locking in the autopilot, they hurried back to the specimen analyses room where Lister was examining the robot’s last collection. They piled into each other in front of Lister, who was wearing an extraordinary grin in what was normally a taciturn face and holding up an enormous crystal column, a beautiful specimen exhibiting a delicate blend of pinkish orange light.
“It can’t be,” said Stremski, staring at the 30-plus centimeter long specimen. “Is it a pad?” he asked, referring to the ultra-rare padparadscha sapphire.
“That big? It can’t be,” said Willard.
“Spec machine says it is, boys,” replied Lister. That his heavily lined face was still wearing a broad grin convinced the others of what he was saying, and a victory dance by Stremski and Willard proceeded to pound worn boots into the ship’s aging deck.
When the two men stopped dancing, having run out of breath quite quickly, Lister deadpanned, “You two done yet?” He waited a couple of heartbeats and broke into another ear-splitting grin before he asked, “You want to see what else we got?”
Days later, Stremski, Willard, and Lister marched into Nikki’s office and placed the cleaned, brilliant, crystal column on her desk.
Patrice regarded the exquisite crystal and said, “Happy birthday, Nikki!”
“It’s gorgeous,” Nikki replied, “but it’s not my birthday.”
“It’s a pad,” Stremski said, beaming. “A rare pink-orange sapphire … a padparadscha,” he plowed on when Nikki and Patrice only stared at him. “It’s worth hundreds of millions of credits.”
“Congratulations on your find, men, are you looking for us to protect it for you until you find a buyer?” Patrice asked.
“It’s not for us,” Willard said excitedly. “It’s for Idona … for the people of the station, the miners, the captains, the crews … everyone in this rim space.”
“Perhaps, I’m a little slow today,” Nikki said, dropping back into her chair. The Haraken president had left her a gift, a nanites chair, and she couldn’t resist enjoying it every opportunity she got. “Explain this from the beginning.”
“It’s like this,” Lister said. “All three of our families were on this station when Portland, may he find torment wherever he is, tried to demolish it. Everyone in this rim space pitched in to help the Harakens … and we won.”
“Okay, all true … and this ties into your magnificent crystal, how?” Nikki asked.
“We won,” Willard said, “and we don’t have a commemoration of what went on here.”
“Yeah, my wife was telling me about how people used to commemorate big events in the old times, and I told Willard and Stremski here that it was sad that we didn’t do anything,” Lister explained. “I mean handing the high judges their heads has to be one of the greatest days across the system, and we stopped their admiral right here at Idona.”
“So, are you saying you want to make this crystal into a commemoration, a memorial, for the events of that day?” Patrice asked.
“That’s it, Lieutenant … I mean Patrice,” Stremski exclaimed. “A pad sapphire this big, this clear, is unique in all the system, and that’s what we are out here … unique.” The three miners puffed up, displaying pride in their faces and stances.
“You sure you don’t want to sell it?” Nikki asked. “That’s an enormous gift you’re talking about … an incredible gift.”
“It’s what our commemoration deserves,” Lister said.
“Besides, Nikki, we had a pretty good run out there,” Willard added and the three miners shared grins. They had a really good run. Inside the collector and nestled with the huge pad were numerous smaller specimens, each of which would fetch tremendous prices from collectors. After decades of just getting by on the rim, the miners had struck it rich.
“Okay, men,” Nikki said. “Patrice, please take possession of this crystal and take note of these men’s names. I want credit given for their gift. We have a memorial to design.”
As the three miners exited the office, Nikki looked at Patrice and said, “Did that just happen?”
“You mean did three loopy miners walk in here, dump a priceless and rare gemstone on your desk, and call it a memorial stone to our independence day. Yeah, I think so. And you know what, Nikki, I’m proud to have been here when it happened.
* * *
Two days before the last Harakens were due to leave Idona, an unveiling ceremony took place in the central rotunda located in the main corridor just outside the station’s administration offices.
Present were the miners, surrounded by their wives and children, Nikki Fowler, Reiko Shimada, the Harakens, and over 1,000 stationers and visitors. The station’s media department was broadcasting the event to the rim, and Z was transferring the signal to the probes across the system. Nikki would have been a great deal more nervous if she knew billions of people were watching the commemoration.
“I’m not an eloquent speaker … having not had much practice while hiding in Idona’s inner ring my entire life,” Nikki began. “But today, as Idona’s station manager, I’m truly proud to be present at this event. These three miners,” Nikki said, gesturing to the beaming men at her side, “reminded me that something momentous happened at Idona almost a year ago, and we did nothing to help us and our children remember those days. They convinced me that we needed a memorial, and they donated something so rare, so unique that it will command the attention of anyone who passes by this memorial for as long as this station or its next iteration occupies this space.”
Nikki nodded to Patrice who pulled off the covering of the memorial, and a gasp went through the crowd. A designer of mineral displays, the one whose works Reiko had admired, was commissioned to craft the memorial. He used a dark, embossed, black metal hexagon base to lift the gem into the air and then wrapped a deep, copper-colored band around the top of the base on which to inscribe the dedication. The beautiful sapphire crystal column stood on its own base at the top. It was encased in disp
lay glass, which passed light from inside the base and into the gemstone from all directions. The pad sapphire shone, its delicate pink and orange colors mixing as if the light came from within it.
“This memorial commemorates the extraordinary period during which Idona Station changed, beginning the moment the Harakens arrived,” Nikki continued. “We’ve heard some people call the Harakens aliens, and some refer to them as our distant human cousins. On Idona, we will always call them our friends. Our miners, Stremski, Willard, and Lister, said it best. This crystal is unique in all the system, and that’s what this memorial called for, because that’s what we are out here … unique.”
Nikki stepped back and the media department’s cam drone closed in on the gem for a better view. Then it dropped to the engraving, which circled the base, and slowly followed the words to allow the people of Sol to read it too. The inscription read: “In the year 837 UE, 253 men and women of Sol sacrificed their lives to preserve the dignity, opportunity, and freedom humans should grant one another as a matter of course. They did so because seven alien humans gave their lives to show us we should. Idona Station extends its deepest gratitude to our friends, the Harakens.”
Two days later, the last Harakens on Idona Station packed up and said farewell to their hosts, leaving the system of Sol much better off than when they found it — a valued tenet of the best of visitors.
— Alex and friends will return in Espero —
Glossary
Haraken
Alain de Long – Director of security, twin and crèche-mate to Alain, partner to Tatia Tachenko
Alex Racine – President of Haraken, partner to Renée de Guirnon, Star Hunter First (Swei Swee name)
