by Alex Oliver
They hurried through the main dome and into the smaller ones where closed in areas cut out the view of the depth of space. The corridors were lined with troughs of growing plants, but also with the scuff marks of endless running feet. There was a gym locker-room smell that the lavender bushes in their wells could not defeat. "We shouldn't be doing this," Wu complained. "Especially not on graduation day. What if we get into trouble? What if I do - I know you don't care. I mean, it's your sister, but--"
"It's not yours. I know," Yas shrugged, passing his bracer in front of the labs door lock. "It's okay. I don't need you to tag along. Go and let me get into trouble on my own, if you want."
"But." Wu sneaked through the door beside him. "I know what you're up to. What if they find out and I get in trouble for not telling?"
Yas faltered as he looked both ways down the smaller service corridor. They were reaching areas of the base where students rarely came, areas where the officers would question them on sight. He could understand why Wu was feeling the pressure, but damn it, he hadn't asked the guy to tag along. Wu's career came a distant second to Dezba's life in his concerns.
"We just won't get caught," he said, ducking into the inner chambers. They had come to the area of the base that tunneled into the crater walls, and the texture of the walls around them had changed from extruded ceramic to a rougher rock, pumice-like and gray. Billions of years old and barren for all that time.
His pass would not open the next door—he wasn't authorized for the labs—but he knew how to jimmy the door with a length of wire and his uniform gloves. Wu at least stood between him and the rest of the world as he did it, shielding him from non-existent passers by. On graduation day only a skeleton staff were left manning the deep space telemetry labs. Everyone who could be at the ceremony were out on the surface enjoying the sense of occasion, the pomp and the party snacks.
The door clicked open and Yas half bounced, half flew inside. Just as he'd hoped, the room was empty, the banks of monitors switched off. A smell of ozone and peaches met his nose. Maybe the out-gassing of what was trapped in the moon-rock, or maybe just the perfume of the last person who had worked here. "Can you wait by the door and tell me if you hear footsteps?" he asked.
Wu was looking increasingly pinched and green, as though he hadn't hoped to get this far. "Sure."
Yas fired up the computers and loaded the most recent data. There were a lot of ship movements to scroll through until he found the program that displayed the results as a three-D hologram. Then he could delete everything that wasn't the sector in which his home world lay and focus in until he could read the labels on the moving dots that were the names of over five hundred ships.
Damn. So many.
Where was the Intrepid? He leaned in with his face close to the map, but he couldn't spot it. Oh, because this was today's data. What if what had happened had happened earlier, and they just hadn't told him? His heart smarted at the thought of his parents at home in their corn fields blithely assuming that because they'd heard nothing it meant that both of their children were safe.
He should call them. And say what, exactly? Not until he knew for sure. He wasn't going to scare them like that for nothing.
No Intrepid yesterday either. The thing that was squeezing his guts was making it hard to breathe. He called up the information for a week ago, and there she was, a little blue dot with a name label, that represented a freighter containing fifty souls.
He watched as she swept out past the orbit of their homeworld, running slow and ponderous. For in-system travel the ships relied on their fusion reactors to supply a steady pulse of acceleration that—sustained long enough—brought them close to the speed of light. But even at that speed, the distances were so vast that interstellar travel would take years.
Fortunately, each ship also contained a micro-jump generator, which depended on the principles of quantum entanglement to allow the ship to skip between locations in the fabric of reality like a flea in a woolly jumper. In practice, the jumps were constrained by power, but by navigating through a series of entrained small jumps a ship could travel much greater distances quickly, coming in and out of reality like a needle on a sewing machine.
The trail of micro-jumps made a dotted line on the holographic map from which Yas could estimate the Intrepid's speed and course. He was particularly good at this. It was, presumably, why his new posting was as a telemetry officer out on the edge of everything known. Someone who couldn't accurately predict how objects were moving, just from a brief glimpse through the sensors, would navigate their ship straight into a rock out there, where nothing had yet been mapped.
Yas ran the simulation of his sister's ship at double speed, watching as two days of movements passed in the space of ten minutes. The Intrepid had just swung around the seventh planet in the system, using it as a gravity boost, and was sailing out towards the colony on its moon, when the gas giant seemed to jostle towards it. The moon too jumped in place as though the Intrepid was pulling it. The next moment, the dot of the spaceship simply blinked out.
Yas caught his breath, not believing his eyes. The planets had moved? No way. It must be a glitch.
Bending over the console, Wu forgotten behind him, he checked the numbers, but yes, that's what they said. The planets had made a small but noticeable deviation towards the Intrepid.
Or towards something in the vicinity of the Intrepid. The ship could not have generated a gravity wave enormous enough to perturb the orbits of planets. But what if something else had appeared there? It had not stayed, because after barely seconds the bodies in the system drifted back to their normal positions. But for one moment there had been something with the weight of a small black hole, and it had come and gone in a blink, taking the Intrepid with it.
He understood all of a sudden why they weren't telling anyone about this. If that was a ship, it was a ship unlike anything human or Ocuilin scientists could equal. If it had ill intent, there would be practically nothing anyone could do about it.
He played the recording again, slower. Could almost see, this time, the shape of the great black wave of it, blossoming into existence and then sucking back out again, Dezba's ship with it.
There was nothing to say the Intrepid had been destroyed. No debris field, no radiation spill. No new sun. He swallowed, not sure whether he was relieved or horrified. Something had happened to her. But she might still be alive.
What he needed was better recordings. With better data he could pinpoint the exact spot where the thing had—
"Put your hands in the air, cadet. Turn and face me."
The voice seemed to come from another universe. Yas’s mind struggled to understand it, but his body got there without him, jerking upright and turning on command. Hadn't he asked Wu for a warning if this—?
Wu would not meet his eye, his round face set in an expression of surly self-righteousness. With a lurch of betrayal and despair, Yas realized that Wu had weighed his options and decided it was better for his career to inform on Yas than to protect him. Yas didn't have any space left in which to resent that - he had too many other things to mind, and frankly he should have expected it.
"My sister's in trouble," Yas tried, flicking his gaze to the military policeman who stood by the door with his stunner aimed. "I had to—"
"You're in trouble, you mean," the MP pulled a set of cuffs from his belt and scoffed. “Five minutes into your career and you’ve already screwed up. What a start!”
The MP had wrinkles the size of canyons and gray eyes that stood out from his jet black skin like pearls. His hair too was gray, what there was of it, which was shaved in a crown of stubble around a sizable bald spot. His stance was lazy and professional, as though he'd seen everything that was to be seen, and was no longer capable of being impressed. "Hands clasped in front of you."
"No, listen," Yas tried, aware that it was futile but unable to stop himself. "I have to do something. I have to—"
"I won't ask you again." True e
nough, the MP strode forward, seized Yas's wrists and before he knew what was happening had cuffed them together in front of him. "Maybe a night in the brig will cool you down."
Yas dug his heels into the rock floor, but the man just lifted him up and pulled him along like an ungainly balloon, the moon's light gravity no match for the muscles under that too-small shirt. An unutterable rage swept over Yas for all things stupid, including old men who thought they knew best and who were determined to force it through with violence. Several "philosophy of rulership" classes flashed behind his eyes, talking about the absolute necessity of the consent of the governed if a society was to thrive. He managed to avoid quoting any of them, but it was a close thing.
"No, wait. Sir, I'm sorry. I have a new assignment today. I should be getting to it. The shuttles will be leaving in half an hour. I can't be late to my first—"
"You should have thought of that, shouldn't you?" Bald-patch didn't so much as shrug, he just hauled Yas, hopping and skipping like a humiliated bunny, down to the cells and threw him in. Yas fell against the wall, bruised his hip against the ledge of the bed and cursed, not managing to get upright again before the door was shut and locked behind him. He didn't punch the wall like a holo star, but it was a close thing.
"I need to talk to the Dean!" he shouted. "I need to tell my new Captain!"
But no one answered. After half an hour of pacing and shouting, it dawned on him that the cell was soundproof. So he screamed with frustration, hurt his throat, and slumped down on the inch thick foam of the mattress to await the morning, with a sense that the universe could not have punished him more for his hopes of the morning.
It was three ages of the world before the door opened again and two marines motioned him to step out, humorless and poised as though he was an actual threat. By now he was exhausted and cowed. He ran his fingers through his hair in an effort to neaten it, jammed his cap on and followed in silence, hoping he would get his say in the Dean's office.
Dean Rabinovitz was a portly forty year old woman with dirty blonde hair and muddy green eyes. Usually avuncular and popular, she looked like the sort of woman who always had a treat in her bag for a small child, and a word of praise for a large. But today her smile was absent, and she stood among her potted plants as though a frost had entered the room.
"Mr. Sundeen. I can't stress enough how disappointed I am in you."
"I'm sorry," was what Yas should have said. Or "perhaps you can understand how concerned I am about my sister." But the night had robbed him of his words. He stood in silence, prepared to take whatever browbeating was coming his way and hoping that life would resume some kind of sense afterward.
"Do you have nothing to say?"
The Dean's office too was hewn out of moon rock, but here the walls had been covered with some kind of silvery stone that contained the fossilized bodies of oceanic creatures. A display of outrageous wealth—the stone must have been brought up the well from Earth. Yas could not imagine how much that must have cost, but it did its job of impressing on him what a very small and powerless person he was by comparison; a scholarship student, whose fees were being completely paid by the government. A government that was expecting a better return than this.
He shook his head slightly, but then rallied. "My sister—"
Rabinovitz sighed. "Mr. Sundeen. I understand that your sister's disappearance is distressing for you. It is distressing for all of us. But I expected you to understand that if information is classified, it is classified for a reason, and that personal involvement in a crisis situation does not trump your duty."
That’s easy for you to say. It’s not your sister, Yas thought resentfully, but he was now tired and beaten down enough to just avoid saying so. "Yes Sir," he agreed.
"I understand that of course you're concerned, and I will say that we have people on this. Better people than you, cadet! We have experts looking at the tapes, formulating plans of recovery. It is not your job to second guess that. It is your job to go to your station and do your work while more important people figure this out."
"I could help," he tried. "I'm good at—"
"I'm sure you think you're indispensable. But the truth is this situation is beyond the grasp of someone with as little experience and training as you. The location is sensitive—on the edges of Ocuilin space—and requires negotiations between our two separate governments."
She shook her head again, and sat behind her desk, thumbing a button on the inset screen. "No, son. Leave the experts to find your sister and bring her home. I'm sure you know we will do everything in our power to find her and every other person on board. But speaking of ships, in your mad desire to poke around our communications you have missed your shuttle to your own."
The further door slid into the wall, and a terrifying creature thudded through from the Commandant's living room. It was fortunate Yas was already standing or he would have leapt to his feet. As it was, he swayed back, and one of the marines jabbed him in the spine with their night-stick.
The newcomer looked like some kind of hastily botched together cyborg. The head was that of a tough young woman with her hair shaved close except for a Mohawk stripe in the center. What could be seen of her arms were muscular and scarred, but an exoskeleton of crude iron bars seemed to have been fed through her flesh and bolted directly onto her bones. He could see the inflamed wounds where the metalwork entered her body. It looked like the worst kind of chop-shop job as performed by an unlicensed surgeon in the back streets of Singapore. (Not that Yas had ever visited Earth, but he had watched a number of dramas.) Even her face was surrounded by a reinforced cage of steel. Her expressions had to form around it, distorting them into something awful. Her smile was a nightmare.
"What the--" Yas exclaimed.
"This is Master Chief Keva Wyse, engineer of the Ragnarok," the Commandant said, frosty with disapproval. She had obviously seen the flinch. "You should be honored that a representative of your crew has come to fetch you. But you should also be ashamed that you needed to be picked up like a school age child. Since you are now graduated from this academy and no longer under my supervision, I will leave the question of punishment for your infraction to your new captain. But I hope you will begin with an apology for wasting your colleague's valuable time."
One of the pieces of pipe fed directly into Chief Wyse's cheekbone. Surely that must hurt? Yas drew himself up and attempted to rescue something from the disaster of the last day. "Thank you, Master Chief, for coming to get me. I apologize for—"
"No worries," said the cut-price cyborg. "I was here anyway. We're parked outside the last gate in the world, kid. You might as well get to walk to the final piece of civilization you'll see for the next ten years."
CHAPTER THREE
A home-made cyborg
You can ask," Chief Wyse said, giving Yas a sideways grin as they walked together to the Academy's central lift. "I know what people usually think when they see me, and we're going to be together for a long decade. So get it over now, why don't you?"
Yas ducked his head, a little ashamed, but he took the chance—anything to distract himself from the gnawing worry and the sense that he ought to be doing something else, if he could only figure out what. But the Dean had a point. He was not an expert or a negotiator, and deep space telemetry was not really likely to turn up anything that they didn't already know. Unpalatable though it was, maybe waiting and hoping was all he could do.
"What made you go for the enhancements?" he asked. "You don't look like you really needed them."
"That's where you're wrong." Keva thumbed the button to call the elevator up the long shaft from the center of the moon. High speed though it was, this would take some time. "I broke my spine—or rather it was broken for me—in a cargo shifting accident. We didn't have any surgeons on board, and I couldn't just stay like that for the months it would take to get back to base. So I programmed the auto-doc to give me an external spine and the neural implants to control it." She smiled.
"When I woke up I had the core strength of a damn fork lift truck, but the rest of my bones couldn't match it, so I decided to upgrade them too."
A shrug as the lift doors opened. The mirrored back of the elevator car showed the movement in all its grisly articulation and Yas didn't think the explanation had really explained anything at all. "Who wouldn't be super-strong if they had the choice?" Keva continued. "Course when I gated back they offered to fix it for me, and we have a doctor on board now. But I don't think it needs fixing. Why would it?"
Yas considered how to say this tactfully, but tact was not his strong point. "You don't find it a little grotesque?"
Keva laughed. "Not my problem. I don't have to look at it. And let me tell you, my partners like a tough woman. I've never had any problem in that respect. If you don't like it, kid, well, it's not for you."
"I suppose," Yas conceded, watching the levels flick past and trying not to look at the inflamed patch on Keva's cheek where she had reinforced her cheekbone. "It's not painful?"
"It itches sometimes, but I've got cream for that." Keva gave that articulated shrug once more, like watching a freight train turn a small corner. "We good now? Was that all?"
"Well," it was Yas's turn to laugh, embarrassed. “I do wonder... how do you put your clothes on and off?"
"What a question to ask a lady!" Keva nudged him in the side. It was a gentle shove, but it was like being shoved by a giant. A visceral appreciation for what Keva called 'super-strong' came with the touch. Her grin was an amalgam of delight at his nerve and shock, and he thought that perhaps they could get on okay. "I shouldn't answer that, but what the hell? I'm an engineer. Velcro is my friend."
Yas found himself blushing up to his ears as belatedly the rudeness of the question occurred to him. Technically he was a newly minted lieutenant and she was just a Chief petty officer, but that still didn’t mean he should take liberties. "Sorry, chief. I--"
