Friendly Fire

by Michelle Levigne

  M'kar growled a silent prayer for Enlo's mercy as she tapped out the code that all the children in her care had been delivered before going to her duty station. Her responsibilities now meant monitoring, quieting and calming the various animals in the labs and life sciences stations. M'kar preferred to work with animals. There was no guilt when she sedated the ones that wouldn't cooperate and fought her influence over their minds.

  "Yes, I'm a bully," she muttered to the universe at large. "Get over it." Then she grinned and felt measurably better. Sarcasm always helped. She had learned that from her father.

  We're getting ready to go through the Chute, she told Thyal. No idea whatsoever what the impact will be on you.

  You're afraid we'll finally lose contact.

  Considering the stars are always completely different on the other end of any Chute? Distance could finally whammy us. One of these days, we're going to find a Chute with the other end in another dimension.

  Just what we need. We finally tell my parents about our link that endures over unimaginable distance and through multiple jump gates. And now when they reported it to the Premier Masters, because of course my father has become a stickler for protocol in his old age … Thyal's chuckle wrapped around her, with a sensation like an arm draped around her shoulders. Well, now that everyone will want to examine and question us until we want to scream, we're going to snap our bond.

  Not permanently. M'kar mentally crossed her fingers and toes, then did it physically too. And her eyes, for good measure.

  You may want it to be permanent, if Master Hyaleen gets her ancient claws on our brains.

  Worrywart.

  Be safe, hearth-sister. Enlo guide and guard you.

  And you, hearth-brother.

  "Enlo watches over fools and children and starship explorers," she told the universe at large as she stepped into the main life sciences lab. Please, Enlo, let me hear him on the other side.

  "What was that?" Tyressto said without glancing up from the pen of hoochikoo larvae she was trying to inoculate.

  "Wondering what sort of thrill ride we have ahead of us."

  "Kaeless and Mooki have a bet going. How many barf bags they're going to need and who loses breakfast first." She glanced up and winked one lavender eye.

  "Fleet does not believe in barf bags."

  "Belief and fact and necessity often refuse to agree."

  "The babies are ready?" M'kar stepped over to the pen. She didn't bother repressing the shudder that always came when she saw and smelled the hoochikoo larvae. They were essentially worms, covered in fur that changed color, length and texture depending on the stimulus coming from their environment. Loud sounds produced the most amazing and nauseating odors and the most eye-straining color combinations.

  "Someday we're going to understand just how long it takes to get from larvae to adult stage, and find a way to get them to sleep through it. Why do gorgeous parents always seem to turn out to be the most irresponsible?"

  "If you had a baby that looked and smelled like that, would you claim it and hang around until it got out of the ugly adolescent stage?" She helped Tyressto pull the frosted, flexible cover down over the pen. Whatever stimulus the larvae endured during the Chute journey, the smells wouldn't escape into the lab, and the cover would dull most of the color shifts.

  "Speaking of babies." She sighed loudly as the cover clicked into place and sealed tight against the floor. "I hope we get a dozen dracs to play with. What?" she added, when M'kar just shrugged and walked away to check the sensors and magnetic seals on the control panel. "From everything we've managed to sift out of those files, dracs could be the perfect pets."

  "And what if anyone they bond with gets an instant death sentence if anything happens before they get out of the ugly adolescent stage?"

  "Hmm. Point." Tyressto held onto her somber expression for all of three seconds, then grinned. "Ready for the coasty-roller?"

  M'kar just sighed and made sure her usual chair was anchored firmly to the emergency track on the floor. She glanced around once to ensure the others responsible for the lab had put away or locked down anything that might fly around and turn into projectiles. Although, if the ship did turn inside out once or twice during the journey, just how "locked down" could anything be?

  As if acknowledging the life sciences lab was ready was the signal the rest of the ship had been waiting for, Quinteer's voice came over the shipwide speaker, counting down the last few seconds until the current of the Chute -- what the irreverent termed the "suckage factor" -- had caught hold of the ship. At "one," a subliminal jolt took the entire ship just before it leaped from its own forward momentum and the speed doubled.

  "Corkscrew," Tyressto called out, half a second before the sensation of spinning sideways to the right.

  M'kar stuck her tongue out and laughed when her lab partner scowled at her. Their team had running bets going on the types of sensations they would experience going through Chutes. Some bet on the sequence of sensations, while others stuck to sensations, period. M'kar preferred corkscrews and bouncing. Tyressto liked turning somersaults for some odd reason, and racking the ship's structure to the point that magnetic locks failed and doors popped open. Then again, Tyressto and her betrothed, Nykols, seemed to enjoy extremes of anything, the more uncomfortable and life-endangering, the better. M'kar hoped they would gain some common sense as they got older.

  "Spectrum," she called out, feeling the color shift before it reached her optic nerves.

  "Oooh, pretty."

  They both laughed as every angle and flat surface gave off waves of undulating color that shifted through the visible light spectrum. Combined with the corkscrew twisting that continued, though slower than M'kar had anticipated, it made for a slightly dizzying, yet entertaining ride.

  "Gravity well," Quinteer announced, his voice sounding like it went through a corkscrew too.

  M'kar braced for her weight to double or triple -- but nothing happened.

  "Negative gravity," Tyressto said.

  The centrifugal force of the corkscrew worked against the sudden lack of gravity.

  "Emerging in ten," Genys announced, far sooner than M'kar was ready to hear it.

  "Short," Tyressto said.

  M'kar nodded. The scientists in the crew who specialized in space anomalies would be in their glory going through all the gathered data, while the rest of them were busy exploring the drac planet. Once they found it. This Chute was only half the time duration of anything she had gone through in her years of service in the Fleet. What were the implications of that? Or maybe it was just an impression, and not a real difference in time and length? That would be something interesting and useful, either way. She held onto the edges of her seat and silently counted down as the colors melted back into normal, no more pretty twisting and streaming. She and Tyressto loosened their safety straps before the all-clear signal went through the ship.

  "No distress from any of our passengers," M'kar announced, getting up and stretching her arms to the ceiling. She bent backwards to loosen the muscles that insisted on tightening no matter how safe, intellectually, she knew she had been during the journey.

  "This is the kind of anomalous anomaly I could get used to," Coober announced, coming into the lab. He waved his datapad. "All signs are good throughout the ship. Kind of makes you nervous, right?"

  "Pessimist." Tyressto stuck her tongue out at him.

  That was the last light moment any of them expected for the next two hours, as the entire ship concentrated on checking every power connector, every seam, every joint, every possible weak or stress point in the ship's skin, the equipment, the sensors, the supplies, and anything else that might have been negatively affected by the transition.

  We made it.

  M'kar waited. Nothing.

  Thyal?

  Silence.

  She had never felt so alone in her own head before.

  ~~~~~~

  "We've found the Corona's camp," Korgan announ
ced, only three hours into the spiraling orbit survey of the peach, green and blue planet filling the Defender's main bridge screen.

  Right now it only had a designation indicating the date, the Defender's serial number, and the coordinates in relation to the Chute. The Corona's records had been so damaged that they didn't even have the designation number its crew had assigned the planet. They deserved the credit, but that had been taken away from them, along with their futures. When the time came, Genys would request that the planet or maybe even the Chute be named for the Corona.

  "Why do I feel like this is a set-up?" Genys muttered, watching the readings scrolling across all the screens on the arms of her command chair. "Ever feel sometimes like we've been caught in the longest training simulation ever?"

  "Like someone's going to jump out from behind a false wall and scold us for some big mistake that should have killed the ship or the patient?" Tahl gave her a serene smile. "All the time."

  "Good. Then I'm not going over the edge into paranoid delusions."

  "Keep believing that." She gestured with a tip of her head toward the forward screen. "Just a little too convenient, you think?"

  "What?" Genys checked another figure that changed. She held up one finger to signal her to wait. "Decker, we have a go on the first landing party." The light for the shuttle waiting to launch turned blue, indicating it had lifted from the shuttle bay floor. "You think it's suspicious we found a planet only four hours of flight in from the opening of the Chute? And even more suspicious that it’s the one the Corona found? Or even more suspicious that everything we're gathering from the sensors is filling in holes in all that jumbled data we retrieved?"

  "Who? Me?" Tahl shrugged. "Don't you know doctors are supposed to be pessimists? It's the healer's oath. Look for every dark cloud and make them darker so the silver linings look even brighter."

  Genys snorted. Her older sister was not only a starship medic, but had made Genys read all her manuals to her to help her study for final exams. That was certainly not part of the healer's oath. Not even the modified, expanded oath created for starship doctors. They had to deal with tricky ethical situations as they encountered new cultures that had developed since the Human race had been scattered by the Gatekeepers.

  The two kept vigil, watching the data filling the screens at the various stations around the bridge, confirming that conditions of the planet were safe for Human life. And more important, other ships weren't hiding in magnetic fields or dust clouds, waiting to pounce on the shuttle as it entered the atmosphere. More data started scrolling in from the sensors reporting on air quality, bacteria levels, and testing for any poisonous gases. The most important screen stayed empty. The one that indicated the existence of civilizations that might not take kindly to a shuttle dropping down out of space on them.

  Nothing happened, other than reporting this planet had no signs of industrialization. No pollutants. No flirtations with various forms of energy generation. This was the most pristine planet Genys had run across, both in training simulations and serving on Fleet ships. Would that make it harder or easier to detect Hiver activity?

  "No signs of Gate energy signatures," Taggert announced, after stepping onto the bridge and settling down at the auxiliary station for the Gate scientists.

  Genys repressed a smile. She had known what he was about to say, just from the way he came onto the bridge. He didn't hurtle through the doors without waiting for them to open wide enough for him to get through or shout the findings almost before the lift doors opened. A sure sign that yet another new planet with potential hadn't been chosen as a hiding place for Humans by the Gatekeepers. Genys preferred that interpretation of the Gatekeepers' motivations -- saving Humans from the disaster that had possibly threatened to destroy Core, the birthplace of Human life. Other planets and cultures varied in their teachings. Some believed their ancestors had worked in partnership with the Gatekeepers. Others said the Gatekeepers had brought them to their planets as punishment, making them exiles rather than refugees. Since the Le'anka had established the Academy and the Alliance and started Humans on the quest to find Core and the truth, nothing found so far had yielded any solid answers.

  "So if there are Humans down there, they got there under their own power." Tahl shrugged and slid off the console where she had perched. "Whether it was on purpose or by accident, that's something we'll have to figure out later."

  "If there is a later," Anya remarked, glancing up from her station.

  "What?" Genys barked, a little louder than she intended. Others looked up from their stations. None of them looked alarmed, just startled out of the intensity of their focus.

  "Just that there are still no signs of refined metals or any other compounds that would indicate manufacturing of any kind -- other than what was left behind in the Corona's camp. That kind of indicates they were in a hurry to leave."

  "I prefer to see it as proof that the Hivers didn't steal everything," Norgon said from his auxiliary station.

  "We're talking Hivers here, not Gleaners," someone muttered. Genys preferred not to listen too closely and identify the voice. She agreed with Norgon.

  "Maybe they planned on coming back," Shalara offered from the bio-scan station next to the communications station. "They had a semi-permanent base camp, they weren't worried about intruders disturbing anything, and they intended to return. I've been thinking that they couldn't possibly have learned enough in the luns they spent here to know for certain it was safe to take the dracs off-planet long-term. It makes sense to me that they planned to come back. Everything they were doing was to protect the dracs, after all."

  "Good theory. Have you recorded that?" Genys nodded approval when the small screen she called her "paperwork reporter" flickered, indicating another report had just been added to the queue of information related to the planet below them. "All right, back to the question. What do you mean by, 'if there is a later'?"

  "If there are no other Humans on the planet, or if Humans got here before the Corona but didn't have the means to survive, then there's no one down there to challenge our presence, or to challenge the survey team's presence," Anya said. "Just playing Shade's advocate," she added with a shrug.

  "Or," Tahl said, "maybe there are descendants of a ship that landed so long ago, whatever alloys made up their ship have disintegrated, merged back into the eco-sphere."

  "Or were submerged deep enough in the seas they can't be read. Yet," Anya added with a grin and a nod to the doctor.

  "Maybe the Corona’s crew left their camp for the convenience of those people."

  "Problem." Genys repressed a smile. The bridge recorders were catching everything said during this crucial part of first contact with an unknown world. Granted, unknown only in the sense that the data the Corona had collected was still in garbled bits and pieces.

  She enjoyed this kind of mental free-for-all, everyone throwing out ideas, offering possibilities. It not only proved the intelligence and imagination of her crew and its cohesiveness, but more times than she could count, someone came up with something that proved useful when something unpredictable slapped the Defender.

  "The survey ship had more than enough room for passengers," she continued. "They had four empty cabins, suited for families. In a pinch, they could fit eight people to a cabin, and triple the occupancy of the ship without straining life support. If there were survivors down there, why didn't they take any of them off-planet?" She chose not to state the obvious: the numbers of cocoons taken off the ship matched the known crew numbers of the survey ship. No one missing.

  "Maybe the Hivers took them off the ship," Shalara offered. "I know: why did the Hivers take only the extras, and leave the exact number of crew still in cocoons? Maybe they found more than they were looking for? We still don't know what exactly Hivers want. This is rough, still thinking things through, but just consider. Maybe Humans who spend any length of time on that planet, especially if they're exposed to the dracs, develop psionic gifts. Maybe the H
ivers realized they had found something new, with higher energy potential, or whatever they get from cocooning people. They took off with the big energy sources and left the ordinary ones. Or maybe something else about the dracs drove them away. Like someone said before, Hiver repellent. More than the drac screams. Who knows?"

  "That would tell us something new about the Hivers, then." Genys spoke slowly, still wrapping her brain around the theory that seemed to sidle out of the back of her thoughts. "Maybe all Hivers are from planets and cultures like the Ankuar, reluctant to deal with Alliance worlds. They're known for antipathy toward Talents. Of course, then why would they attack the ship and kidnap the people from the drac planet if they don't value Talents? Unless they're looking for specific brains, and the brains of the drac planet people shot off a metaphorical flare. Or maybe those different brains turned out to be a virus, like a computer virus, and the Hivers took off in a panic, not sure what was happening to their system. Wouldn't that be a boon?"

  "It'd be less trouble to just blow them out of space," Taggert said, nodding. "If I was a raider of any type, and a treasure chest I just opened up turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, I'd step back and annihilate it. Especially if it looked like rescue was on the horizon."

  "So why didn't they destroy the Corona when they fled? Did they flee so fast, they didn't have time? Or they panicked so bad they made mistakes? Maybe they did set up a trap, but the trap didn't work." Genys waved her hand, brushing away the responses she could see on the faces around her. Data from the shuttle, now entering the atmosphere, rolled across her chair arm screens and the forward screen. "Save it for later." She glanced around the bridge, meeting the gazes of everyone who had joined in the speculation. "That's a lot for later. Whatever we find or don't find down there, we are not going to be bored."

  "I pray for boredom," Tahl muttered, her voice pitched perfectly so everyone on the bridge heard, as indicated by the snickers, shared glances, and grins before everyone turned back to their duty stations.