Cryptikon Far Freedom Part 2

by Warren Merkey

for the hard work he saw ahead of him. It seemed that in his few idle moments he yearned for a memory of a woman named Ana. He could only imagine his loss, and his imagination made it too much to bear. It helped that Fidelity - he had spent most of his remembered life calling her "Demba" or "Fidelity" - it helped that Zakiya understood his melancholy pain and was gentle with him.

  "More serious than you realize," Zakiya said.

  "It's only a range of five degrees," he explained, "in which we don't have an accurate heading. That's why we are now oriented to south as the preferred bow."

  They viewed a large glowing hologram of the ship in the darkened Engineering Planning Office. He never tired of looking at his handiwork.

  "That's not the reason," Zakiya said. She rotated the hologram to bring certain features to where they stood. "You see the damage to the pylons?"

  "I've compensated for them," he protested. "The drive envelope has barely lost a decimal place. Now will you tell me about the accessory circuits in the pylons?"

  "They are necessary circuits. Seven damaged pylons no longer meet the height and alignment specifications."

  "Obviously! But they are tons of metal buried a meter below three meters of hard passive shielding. Don't tell me you want them fixed!"

  "I do! I want them fixed!"

  He was momentarily irritated at this demand, until he remembered that Zakiya had information about the design and purpose of the ship buried in her auxiliary memory, information he was anxious to learn.

  "Have you remembered why you had them installed?" he asked.

  "They are connection points for some kind of external structure."

  "What external structure? And how can it make contact through a meter of passive shielding?"

  "The shielding must be removed before we arrive at our next destination."

  "Do you mean the shield material immediately around pylons?"

  "All of the shielding, right down to the bare hull plates!"

  Khalanov didn't correct her archaic phrase. There were no individual plates in the hull; she knew that. The hull was a single, atomically-fabricated unit.

  "All of the shielding?" he complained, trying to sound more horrified than he was. It was a ritual for them which had lately begun ending in laughter. Zakiya wasn't laughing now. "And you won't tell me what this external structure is!"

  "I can only tell you it's big. Every pylon has the accessory circuits. Every pylon connects. Can you fix the damage?"

  "Yes! But what does the external structure do?"

  "I don't remember anything more about it, Iggy! I keep hitting a blank wall. All I know is that it's necessary for us to survive where we're going. How long to repair the pylons?"

  "Two or three days, depending on how we do it. It's only a guess. You know I was always conservative in my estimates, but too much now depends on too few! And we are not in a convenient, pressurized maintenance bay!"

  "What will you do about the passive shielding?" she asked.

  "It depends on whether we have to scrape it off very carefully, or if we can burn it off."

  "How would you burn it off?"

  "Gas giant atmospheric friction or solar corona."

  "That means wallowing through Einsteinian space."

  "If you want a clean hull..."

  "Can you blow the shielding off with explosives? I'm betting it doesn't need to be perfectly cleaned from the hull."

  "That's a novel idea! The hull is tough enough to survive chemical explosives. Drive geometry should remain within pattern tolerances. I'll have to run a test. How much time do I have?"

  "Very little. Freddy has brought us near our destination early. I gave him sailing lessons. My guess is a maximum of five days and a minimum of two."

  "You can be very demanding, Zakiya!" Iggy declared, tempering his declaration with humor. "Even more demanding than Fidelity was." He didn't want to return to those days when he and Fidelity and Direk didn't fully trust each other. The ship meant too much to him now. This wonderful woman meant even more to him.

  "You always used to call me Zak," she said, almost musically. The business at hand now finished, she sounded obviously happy with him.

  "On the Frontier?" he wondered. "Was that a nice thing to do? It doesn't seem very respectful."

  "You had everybody calling me Zak. You were my nemesis, always keeping me from being too serious."

  "I wish we had more time to talk! Your memories may be all I ever know of my past."

  Zakiya startled Iggy by kissing him and she gave him a wistful smile.

  "Why did you do that?" Iggy asked, touching his cheek where her lips had pressed.

  "A memory of you, back on the Frontier - somewhat parallel to this - gave me joy. I apologize. It's not in the Navy Code of Conduct."

  "I have no complaint! I always wished we could be friends. It was never possible for me to reach out to you through the atmosphere of distrust generated by the Navy. You're so different now!"

  "You wanted to be friends with the person I used to be? I can't imagine why."

  "Perhaps somewhere deep inside I knew you were Zakiya."

  "Perhaps somewhere deep inside is the Iggy who was once my fond nemesis."

  She kissed him again. Someone cleared her throat behind them.

  /

  Zakiya turned to see a female Navy officer standing at attention.

  "At ease, Wingren - of the Commodore Keshona Research Society."

  "May I ask a quick question, Admiral?" This Rhyan female was never one to hold back in Zakiya's brief experiences with her in Navy Archives. "I haven't been able to catch Major Jones. Is Alexandros Gerakis her father?"

  "Why would you think so, Wingren?" she countered with a smile.

  /

  Iggy was trying to return to his engineering problems while savoring his warm relationship with Zakiya. His attention was wrested away by this new arrival. What this Rhyan officer said about Alexandros Gerakis surprised him. Who was she and how did she know such things about Zakiya and her daughter?

  "I was with your daughter," Wingren said, "when she retrieved the crew portrait of the Frontier. She was quite interested in Captain Gerakis. Perhaps I was being too imaginative when I saw some resemblance between Gerakis and Major Jones."

  "She does look more like her father than me," Zakiya agreed. When she saw the expression on his face, she winked at Iggy. "If you bury yourself in Engineering all the time you should expect to miss a few things, Iggy! Carry on."

  Zakiya departed, leaving Iggy standing next to the Rhyan officer. He was at a loss for words, his mind filled with new thoughts warring for attention. He stared after Zakiya long after she was absent from his sight.

  "Reporting for duty, sir," Wingren said, after waiting too long.

  Iggy pulled himself together. He reminded himself that Zakiya was depending on him alone, because of the death of Direk. It gave him the needed force to clear his mind. He turned to the lieutenant commander. "You are reporting for duty?"

  "I was just released from temporary duty with Security, sir. I'm an engineer."

  Iggy extended his hand hesitantly, not sure a handshake was a custom shared by the Rhyan desert cultures, and not sure he wanted to feel the texture of her hand. She took his hand without hesitation and with a grip that kept him from sensing any difference in her almost scaly skin. He smiled with relief and pleasure, because she was pleasant to look at and decisive in her actions. She was with Security?

  "What is this about the Commodore Keshona Research Society?" Iggy asked.

  "I and three others, sir, have studied Commodore Keshona for several years. As a serious hobby. We were eventually able to prove her current identity."

  "Are you sure? Who is she?" Wingren looked quizzically at him, so quizzically that he knew he had missed something. "I'm old and perhaps loaded beyond my capacity with responsibilities," Khalanov said. "Please help me understand."

  "Sir, I was under the impression that you've known Admiral Demba for a long time.
"

  "A very long time. What has that to do...?"

  Wingren waited. Iggy thought. Zakiya... Fidelity... Ruby Reed... He knew what Wingren implied. And if it was true...

  "She was Keshona! Now I understand how she may have done it!"

  "Did what, sir?"

  "Approach Rhyandh without being detected."

  "How did she do it?" Wingren asked with sudden intensity.

  "An impossible way! We'll learn the details in two to five days. All this time, I never could have suspected she was Keshona! Even less, the wife of Alexandros Gerakis! I'd like to see your evidence sometime, Wingren."

  "Gladly, sir. I'd like to hear of your experiences in Deep Space Fleet."

  "Unfortunately, I have no memory of that. I had a wife they say was quite special, and I don't remember her, either."

  "I regret your loss, sir."

  Despite the desert skin and the hawk-like eyes, Wingren pleased his senses. Her attitude was refreshing and her character interesting. He hoped her engineering skill was as promising. He needed all the help he could get.

  "Come along, then!" he said. "We have a lot of work to do. Do you have any experience with explosives?"

  2-18 Captain Jones and the Malay Pirates

  She was on the bridge before but, suffering emotionally from powerful memories, she had failed to appreciate its beauty. Nor had she seen it in its full "planetarium" mode. It was dark. Operational consoles glowed dimly, like islands floating at several levels and in different directions from the captain's chair. The floor was barely visible, below which she could see stars. Overhead, more stars completed the sphere. She found her mother seated in a courtesy chair next to Horss. Demba reached out for her and pulled her to a chair next to