Ragnarok: Colonization, intrigue and betrayal.

by Andrew Claymore

  “I, on the other hand, might be guilty of a felony,” she said, stopping there so she could enjoy her mother’s reaction.

  “I think you have your sentences backwards, chica,” Adelina said. She looked at her sister as she sat opposite her. “Age of consent,” she explained for the newcomer.

  Luna nodded, then looked at Gabriella, a grin spreading over her features. “I think our girl has it right, Sis. She’s three times Hack’s age.”

  Adelina couldn't have looked more surprised if you’d stuck a finger up her nose. Gabriella leaned over to whisper in her ear. “They’re too young for us both so keep it in your pants, Mrs. Robinson!”

  Adelina let loose a stream of invective but it was all in Spanish so the others only knew she was pissed at whatever the daughter had just said to her. She stopped for breath.

  “It... is... not... funny, young lady,” she insisted, but a smile was now creeping onto her face.

  Gabriella simply smiled back, trying, perhaps a little too obviously, not to laugh. She let a giggle escape.

  “You’re all used to a pretty loose attitude toward sex,” Luna told the room. “But now you’ve got to realize there’s a new dimension to consider. Frankly, we should have thought of this before the wedding.”

  “Oh!” Gabriella covered her mouth with her hands. “Luna! You’re a felon for sure!”

  “Kill me now,” her mother muttered, staring up at the ceiling, face red.

  “That’s just a figure of speech, folks,” Luna said, “not a command.” She grinned, looking at her sister. “Right?”

  “Hey, Hack!” Gabriella said loudly, catching the young man off guard. She continued into his lab, moving around to get a better look at what he was working on.

  “Oh, hey… Gabriella,” he said after a pause. He had probably been about to say ‘my lady’ again.

  “What are you working on?”

  “I, um, I’m just trying to isolate the bits of code that specify the look of the town,” he said, pointing. “See that cluster of code?”

  She looked closer. One of the holographic hexagons had rows of cuneiform and a link to a miniature holographic streetlight. “You’ve got the code for the public lighting?”

  She read the characters. “Every intersection node with additional inter-node installations to provide a minimum of five standard imperial lumens on all paved surfaces.”

  He touched the lamp and a new code hex popped up. “You can alter the look of the lamps by editing the sub-elements, shown here in orange code.”

  “Cool! But the lamps are already kind of awesome. It’s the walls and buildings that are kind of lame.” She tucked a strand of hair out of the way.

  She looked over at him, wondering why there was so much silence. He looked away from her quickly, his ears red.

  “I can pull up the town wall but I’m still looking for the houses in this thing. It’s pretty old code.” He opened a new hex and slid it over in front of her. An image of a wall section popped up next to it.

  “Should you be here?” he asked her. “I mean, alone, without your mother?”

  “My mother might say I shouldn’t.” She shrugged. “This is part of why I’m here though. Some day, you might have a daughter of your own and this is how she might act. You’ll try to set boundaries and she’ll try to circumvent them every chance she gets.”

  “And will she get some poor programmer in trouble with her mother as well?” Hack asked mildly.

  “I doubt my mom would get angry at you,” she said. “I’m the one who ditched her down in the hangar bay and snuck up here to talk about town design.”

  “Maybe,” he said guardedly, “but she’ll probably see the guilty look on my face and assume the worst.”

  “Why the hells would you look guilty?”

  “Because I’m not entirely certain what’s correct in a situation like this,” he said. “And, frankly, you’re quite pretty.”

  “You’re so full of it!”

  He shook his head. “You wild Humans are very attractive.”

  “Okay, whatever.” He needs to get out more. “I’m pretty sure my aunt trusts you to behave yourself and I’m not going to force myself on you or anything. I’m not ready for that just yet. I may be a legal adult in a couple of weeks but I’m setting my own schedule.”

  “So, your mother sets a boundary and you push it back only to set a similar one of your own?” He smiled. “Your mother seems to be doing a good job.”

  “Yeah,” Gabriella agreed. “She’s a hard-ass but she’s the best.”

  He looked like he was about to say something about that but his smile morphed into a look of alarm as he looked over her shoulder. “I wasn’t asking her about your backside,” he insisted, hands up. “She just said that for no apparent reason.”

  “Wha…” Gabriella remembered what she’d said and she doubled up laughing.

  “‘Hard-ass’ is a figure of speech,” Adelina explained, strolling into the room. “As you can plainly tell, thanks to these damned under-armor suits.

  “I don’t know what I missed but I clearly showed up here at the right moment.” She gave her daughter a hug.

  “How long were you standing in the hall?” Gabriella’s muffled voice asked.

  “Long enough.” She let go. “As for you, Hack, you seem like a decent guy. I don’t have any complaints about my daughter working on a shared interest with you.

  “What I do have a problem with,” she continued, turning a raised eyebrow on her daughter, “is people sneaking off on me. I was probably talking to thin air for a good three minutes down in the hangar!”

  “Yeah,” Gabriella said. “My bad. Folks are gonna think you’re eccentric. Sorry. I just wanted to see if Hack was interested in working on the town design and I figured you’d make him nervous.”

  “So, instead...” Adelina nodded at the programmer. “… Poor Hack is wondering if he’s going to get in trouble with me for consorting with somebody the empire and republic would call an NNM.”

  “Noble-non-majority...” Hack shook his head. “It’s strange. We have clearly delineated rules for all of this but having a new… home-world with its own set of rules…

  “Integrating with Irth is going to be complicated. I mean, I’m supposed to be an adult but I’m less than half your age, so even an adult from Irth would have to think twice about…” He looked at Adelina.

  “Pardon, Lady Adelina. It sounds like I’m accusing your sister…”

  She waved it off. “You guys are a special case. You’re… born, I suppose, with more knowledge and perspective than a Human infant. You’ve got six years of practice with all of that, so it lets you function as an adult.”

  She gestured to her daughter. “It took her two years before she could say more than one word at a time.”

  “Yeah, I was born with a few instincts and nothing else,” Gabriella said. “Just the basic firmware. I could breathe, wave my little arms around and scream for a boob.” She giggled, having just made Hack glance at Adelina’s chest.

  “We don’t have those pods you guys use,” she added. “We learn by existing, at least until we’re five. Then we start going to school.”

  “And that’s kind of the same as what you’re doing with us, right?” he asked. “Teaching us with examples?”

  “Pretty much,” Adelina confirmed. “Sometimes the examples are uncomfortable but, yes.”

  Gabriella handed her mother a mug of tea and curled up next to her on the couch in the lounge between their bedrooms. They looked out the large window at the swirling colors.

  Adelina arched her back. “I don’t know about you, kiddo, but I feel wrung out after the day we had. Being on display is a lot more tiring than I expected.” She put an arm around her daughter.

  “I think it’s time for me to get out of the boundary business,” she said meditatively. She looked at Gabriella’s questioning face. “I’m serious. You know what you’re doing. I’m just gonna be a consultant now – your own
personal consultant.”

  “You could help me figure out the right diet to keep these darn zits under control,” she grumbled.

  “Your aunt always swore that citrus was the key. She was a late bloomer too. Suddenly shot up at your age.”

  “Really?” Gabriella sat up and stared at her mom.

  “Really. Not on her skin, though, she just took in lots of vitamin C.”

  Gabriella rolled her eyes. Making her mom laugh.

  “Yes, really. She had a longer awkward phase, though boys still noticed her. Her skin was a mess up till the year she left for officer candidate school.”

  “Is that why you give her a hard time about her taste in clothing?” Gabriella asked. “Because I take after her a bit and you worry I’ll be doing all the same things?”

  “No…”

  Gabriella was leaning against her mother and she could feel the sudden tension in her. She sat up and looked at her. “What land-mine did I suddenly step on?”

  “It’s not important.”

  Gabriella considered everything she knew or, at least, thought she knew about her aunt. “Did she steal some boy from you?”

  “You’ve got too much of your abuelo in you,” Adelina grumbled.

  And that complaint wouldn’t put him off the trail, she thought. “Was this before I came along?”

  “Long before.”

  “Long?” She tilted her head quizzically. “You’re only thirty-four and I’m almost eighteen…”

  Adelina sighed. “Okay, it seemed longer at that age.”

  “So… maybe the reason things didn’t work out between you and Dad is because you were still messed up over whatever happened between you and Aunt Luna?”

  “Or because I was just seventeen and didn’t know what I was doing?” Adelina said but she seemed to regret it almost instantly. “Hey, I don’t mean…”

  “Mom,” Gabriella cut her off. “It’s okay. You can regret the mistakes of your youth without labeling me as one of them. I’ve seen enough after-school dramas to understand that.

  “Besides,” she continued, “The people on this ship were made to order by a corporation. Compared to that, I’m practically the product of a fairy-tale romance. The offspring of two star-crossed lovers,” she declared in a movie announcer voice, “who met by a rare twist of fate in the bushes behind Edgemont High…”

  “Mph!” Adelina set her mug down and rubbed at her nose, laughing and choking at the same time. “You made me get tea up into my sinuses!”

  Ragnarok

  The Kuphar, High Orbit

  “Stupid name,” Frank grumbled, but not so loudly that Terry would hear.

  “Shh!” Trisha leaned her head against his shoulder but kept her eyes focused out the starboard loading bay door. “He’s thrilled they picked his entry, don’t ruin it for him.”

  He moved his butt, settling more comfortably on their favorite pallet of seed and put an arm around his fianceé. “It just feels like bad luck,” he said quietly. “Naming the place after the apocalyptic battle at the end of time is asking for trouble. I can’t believe they got nervous about your luck but they’ll happily live on a planet named Ragnarok.”

  “It’s far enough removed that they don’t care about it,” she explained. It’s not like you see temples to Odin in India – or anywhere, for that matter – so pagan European mythology is no more frightening to us than an artifact in a museum. They just like the sound of the name.”

  “No sense complaining, I suppose,” he admitted. “Best if we just…” He sucked in a breath as the swirling colors of path-travel aligned, stretched and then shrunk into the normal, star-studded black of space.

  A chime sounded from somewhere deep inside the ship and a series of mechanical sounds followed.

  “That’s our star!” Vikram exclaimed from the neighboring pallet where he was sitting with Terry.

  “And that should be our planet,” Frank added, “just to the left.”

  As if the ship had heard him, a holo projected outside the shield showed the planet’s name.

  “Ragnarok,” Terry said in wonder.

  “It’s a cool name,” Trisha’s son said.

  “Right?” Terry hopped off the pallet and joined the others who were edging closer to the atmo-shielding at the loading door.

  He ducked, involuntarily, as a black shape streaked past the opening, angling to hurtle planetward. Another passed in the other direction. Holo icons tried to match their movement but failed. The computer settled for a simpler declaration, projected onto the shield, that indicated the combat air patrol was deployed.

  “Our lady’s contribution to the new republic,” Trisha said with a pride that Frank shared.

  “And our captain must be itching to be out there with them.” Frank chuckled.

  You never know what you’ll find after a long path, especially when it’s a path leading away from all known civilization. The Kuphar, a gift from Lady Bau, was a fast-freighter. She carried no weapons.

  Until she’d become a Human ship, aside from a couple of Qauilu specialists.

  Another fighter blurred past the loading door. Captain Billy Hennessy, AKA Thruster, was probably eager to get started on the plan that would turn his ship into a proper carrier.

  But first, there was a colony to build.

  The light representing Ragnarok seemed to be moving away from the system’s single star. It took a moment for Frank to realize what he was seeing. The Kuphar was approaching far more quickly than anything his brother had ever built in that fancy lab of his.

  Now the planet was growing in size as well. Frank had lost track of time as they watched but the fact that his left leg had fallen asleep indicated they’d been watching for a long time.

  He shifted with a grimace, hissing as the pins and needles came.

  Trisha took a quick look around the cargo bay and then set to work with her right hand, kneading the muscles of his leg. “Does that help?”

  “Mmm. More than it should,” he said in a low voice.

  She gave his leg a final squeeze and took her hand away. “Soon,” she told him.

  The holo projection outside of the shielding updated with a new line and a series of overlapping circles, each indicating a ship. They resized to dots and the list arranged itself into a table on the right side.

  Their lord was already here with his fleet.

  “I thought they were taking some time to get married?” Terry turned back to Frank and Trisha. “How are they already here?”

  “This freighter’s fast,” Frank told him, “But those ships all have military-grade engines in ’em. John says they can slip through path at twice our speed. Plenty of time to get married, have a reception and then off to Ragnarok for the honeymoon.”

  Not for the first time, he wondered why his brother hadn’t come up to the Kuphar before they left Earth. It was hard to be angry, though, since he hadn’t noticed John’s absence until after they’d left.

  If he had to choose, though, he felt more secure knowing a lord of the republic was here with his warships. He doubted he’d ever lose the feeling of being exposed out here but he was fairly certain he’d learn to push it to the back of his mind. For now, he was happy to see all those ships.

  “Frank McAdam,” a voice boomed from somewhere up in the overhead structure of the bay. “This is the captain. Please stand up and sing out; you’re wanted on this call.”

  He looked at Trisha but she looked as surprised as he felt. “How do I…” He pressed his lips together, shaking his head at the weirdness of knowing something because it had been placed in his head.

  He hopped off the pallet and found a clear space on the decking. “Captain, this is Frank McAdam.”

  A holo-node in the rafters scanned him and projected the call. The other nine members of the council were either there or a place in the ring awaited their inclusion.

  Frank still felt he had no business being on the council but Sushil had left him little choice. The man had camp
aigned for Frank on his own initiative and he’d managed to get both Frank and himself chosen.

  Sushil shimmered into view next to Frank.

  “Mr. Chairman,” Frank nodded politely.

  Sushil grimaced and nodded back, then looked around the ring. A last straggler arrived and Sushil turned to Captain Hennessy. “That’s all our people, Captain.”

  “Thank-you, Chairman Kawle.” Hennessy turned to the side for a moment and then four new attendees came into view.

  Gleb and Luna were flanked by a Quailu that Frank assumed must be Lady Bau (though he still couldn’t tell one Quailu from another) and by his brother, John. He was so surprised that he almost greeted him before remembering this was a meeting with the lord of the entire species.

  “Councilors,” Gleb said, “welcome home!”

  Frank felt a breath catch in his throat. This is home for us now! There’s nothing but wild planet down there but we’re going to land on it and make a place for ourselves.

  “We’re all new at this,” Gleb continued. “I suppose we should have come up with some sort of ceremony, something that would stick in our memories…”

  “A ceremony, you say?” Sushil asked.

  Frank looked over at his holographic friend with alarm. “Sushil…” he began.

  “One of our council members is getting married, as it turns out,” Sushil waved a hand toward Frank.

  “You’re getting hitched?” John blurted. “How long have you been waiting to tell me this? Who’s the bride?”

  “We met in Earth orbit,” Frank said, “and things moved along pretty quickly from there, given circumstances. Not that I’m complaining,” he added quickly, knowing Trisha was sitting behind him, watching the conversation.

  “I think I can relate to that,” Luna told him.

  “We can help,” Gleb said. “I’ve got recent first-hand experience in this kind of thing. I’m kind of an expert now,” he added, clearly mocking himself.

  “An expert?” Luna leaned back to look up at him. “My family think there’s something wrong with you, you know. Like something involving repeated impacts to the head or something.”