Endless Blue-ARC

by Wen Spencer

  Mikhail might sell one of his Reds to the Rosetta as a sex toy to get continued help, but he wouldn't kill one of his own crew. He was sure of that.

  Rabbit sniffed and scrubbed at his eyes. "Why—why does it hurt so much?"

  Turk sighed. He'd never had this talk with one of his Reds before. There was never any need. With the exception of cat fanciers, Reds never interacted with women. "It's called love."

  "No, Hillary taught me about love. Love feels all warm and soft and good. This feels like someone pushing something through my chest."

  "Love is mostly about pain." Turk said. "What happened on the Rosetta?"

  "I heard what sounded like a body falling, so I investigated and found Captain Bailey assaulting . . ."

  "No, I mean with Hillary. When did all this start? How long have you been . . .?" And how the hell did I miss it? Scratch that, I know: I let myself be distracted by Paige.

  "The first day, when Hillary was shopping, I felt so stupid and clumsy. But then she started to ask me questions. What space was like? How dark was it? Do stars actually twinkle? What's it like to be weightless? Were planets really balls? And I realized that we just knew different things. She knew her home and I knew about our home."

  "I meant the love part."

  Rabbit looked at him in confusion. "It is part of the love part. She said she liked talking to me and I said that I liked talking to her. We went to this place in the hold, where no one goes, and we talked."

  "Just talked?"

  "At first." Rabbit studied him. "Am I in trouble for doing more than talking?"

  "No." Turk kept all anger out of his voice. He was no longer sure who all he was angry at. Rabbit, though, was the most innocent person on the list.

  "The space in the hold was really small, so we had to be close together while we talked. And I realized that I liked being close to Hillary. And she said she liked to be close to me."

  God, at this rate, it was going to take half an hour until he found out if they had had intercourse. Worse it sounded more innocent than any teenage fumbling that Turk had witnessed, meaning he insulted Paige's little sister for nothing.

  "Did you make love?" And in case that wasn't clear enough, Turk added technical terms for body parts and used hand motions to make it obvious.

  Rabbit gave a tiny nod. "Many times."

  So Rabbit had lived up to his name while Turk wasn't paying attention.

  "Commander?" Inozemtsev called down the hallway to Turk. "The Captain wants you and Rabbit in his cabin immediately."

  Despite being just a kitten, Rabbit was a seasoned warrior. Heartbreak he couldn't understand, but walking into a warzone he knew how to deal with. He took a deep cleansing breath and stood, sealing away all fear and uncertainly behind icy calm. Turk envied the crèche-raised that sometimes; to be able to shut off all feeling except anger, because anger was useful.

  It was the first time he ever dreaded stepping into Mikhail's cabin the same way he used to dread going into Ivan's office.

  "Commander Turk and Private Rabbit here as ordered." Turk snapped a salute.

  "At ease. There is something I need to show Commander Turk." Mikhail cued something up to his monitor.

  Turk took a deep breath as he realized that the nearly naked woman on the screen was a Red. He wanted to ask Mikhail questions but not in front of Rabbit, who might repeat it to Hillary.

  "Eraphie?" Rabbit asked.

  "Yes, soon to be your cousin, Eraphie Bailey."

  "Bailey?" Turk's stomach gave a sickening lurch. No, he must have misheard.

  "What's a cousin?" Rabbit asked.

  "It means Eraphie and Hillary's fathers came from the same Red lot," Mikhail said.

  "The Baileys . . .are Reds?" Turk asked.

  "What's a father?" Rabbit asked.

  Mikhail studied Turk before saying, "Rabbit, report to the Rosetta. They've bought you. Ask them to explain father, since you might be one soon."

  "Does being a father have anything to do with shooting Captain Bailey?"

  "No. Go on. They're waiting for you."

  Rabbit snapped a salute and left.

  "They're Reds?" Turk asked again.

  "No. They're not." Mikhail said quietly. "Reds are humans raised in the dehumanizing crèches, where they're mentally shaped into weapons and nothing else. The Baileys are all natural born humans, raised by loving mothers and fathers with a wide extended family."

  "That." Turk pointed at Eraphie. "Is a Red. How more cat-like does she have to get before you see her as a Red?"

  The comline chimed as Mikhail stared at him in amazement. Mikhail slapped on the intercom. "What?"

  "Sir, I need to talk to you about . . .something." Tseytlin's voice came over the com. "You really need to see this."

  "I'll be shortly." Mikhail slapped off the com. "I would have thought that you, of all people, would understand. Rabbit might have just walked out of here as a Red, but the main reason I'm letting him go is because I believe in ten or twenty years, with the Baileys beating that Red mentally out of him, he will be just as human as you are."

  "I'm not human."

  "Yes, you are." Mikhail cried and came to grab his shoulders. "Turk, I was brewed in a petri dish and decanted out of a bottle just like you. I know I'm human, and I know you're just as human as I am."

  "When you can fur over under stress, we'll talk about being the same," Turk didn't trust himself to stay in the room. He was angry enough to hurt someone. He didn't want it to be Mikhail. Blind as he was, Mikhail still meant well. It wasn't Mikhail that he was angry with.

  Paige had lied to him. He'd asked that first day if he was the only Red onboard, and she had told him yes. They were all Reds, and she had told him that he was the only one. He'd been so gratified that she didn't look at him in horror, that she treated him with compassion, all the while keeping the truth from him. That under the skin, she was no different than he was.

  * * *

  Upset as Mikhail was over the fight over Rabbit and Turk's whole reaction to it, he put it aside when he saw Tseytlin. The man looked completely distraught.

  "What's wrong?" Mikhail put out a hand to steady the man and was dismayed when he flinched away.

  "There are nefrims on the ship." Tseytlin whispered.

  "What?" Mikhail reached for the alarm but Tseytlin caught his hand.

  "No, no, no, they don't know that we know that they're there. We have to get the upper hand here." Tseytlin scurried to a parts locker and started to dig out equipment. "I have to apologize to you, Captain. You told me that they were there and I thought I was through, but I should have trusted you and looked harder. Instead I just thought you'd gone a little loony on us. Considering your family history, I thought it best not to comment on it."

  What was Tseytlin talking about? Mikhail hadn't said anything about nefrims being on the ship. And what did he mean—family history? Did he mean the infamous bloody reigns of various Tsars of ancient Russia?

  "Calm down man, and tell me what's wrong," Mikhail said.

  Tseytlin scurried back to Mikhail, his arms overflowing, to whisper, "Back at Fenrir, when you asked me to look for invisible aliens, I was worried you were going over the edge. Especially when I set up a standard perimeter security line and not a thing showed up. I was worried that you were losing it. I truly was."

  You and me both, Mikhail thought. But he had Tseytlin looking for seraphim, not nefrim. "What's happened?"

  "I found the bastards!" Tseytlin winced at his own loud outcry and dropped back to a whisper. "The ship is crawling with them! Invisible—or something."

  "Nefrim?" Nefrim were a meter tall with half a dozen limbs. The seraphim were—as far as he could determine—snake-like. "Are you sure?"

  Tseytlin nodded vigorously as he piled the equipment into a cart. "The notes you gave me earlier—most of them I can't understand—had details on the results of sensors used to detect 'ethereal beings.'" Tseytlin indicated quotes around the words with his fingers. "I
had to look those words up. But it made me realized that our standard security system was inadequate for this place and—and—I had the Rosetta people get me sensors for testing a myriad of things. Not the standard motion and heat—just—just—everything. I threw together a small grid in the hanger, just as a test run, and fed them all through pattern recognition software to a rendering engine."

  "Okay." Mikhail tried for a soothing and calm answer. "The seraphim become visible then?"

  "Seraphim hell!" Tseytlin pointed to a bank of monitors. "Look!"

  Each sensor reported in a different color of light. As each sensor was mapped out, it was just a mass of disorganized colors playing through the vast space. It overlaid the slight distort in the air that Mikhail recognized as a seraphim moving through the hanger. He scanned the monitors, looking for the composite image, expecting to find the snake-like form of the seraphim. But the composite was the familiar multi-limbed body of a nefrim.

  "But that's not what I—" Mikhail stopped. He couldn't truly 'see' anything any of the times he 'saw' the seraphim. He had only gotten impressions. The seraphim were already messing with his mind; perhaps they were influencing what he saw too. "Are they using some kind of camouflage gear?"

  Tseytlin shook his head. "They're passing through walls, equipment and people. It's like they're not really there, but they are."

  "Ghosts." Mikhail murmured.

  "Kind of. Out of phase with us somehow. Most of the crew doesn't seem to perceive them. Only a handful of reds react to them but don't seem to be able to track them."

  Hardin had said there were no nefrim in the Sargasso. He might have been lying, but more likely mistaken. If this was the nowhere that you went when you misjumped—and the only such nowhere—the universal constant for failing to safely arrive back to normal space—then it would also be where lost nefrim ships went.

  21: War Room

  Turk was still glowering when Mikhail called a meeting of his officers. Mikhail didn't know how to make things better for Turk, so he ignored him, hoping that giving Turk time and space to work it out would help.

  "Our mission was to find the Fenrir and the other missing human ships." Mikhail had set up the recorder to include their briefing with the engine if they ever reached that point. "We were to determine if they were in enemy hands. At first there seemed to be no nefrim activity here, but now we've found that the seraphim are nefrim with abilities we've never seen before."

  "Nefrim ghosts." Turk grumbled from where he was holding up the wall.

  Hak had claimed that the seraphim were enlightened beings but the rest of their race was descending into hell. Certainly the description matched the nefrim's habit of reducing planets to rubble, uninhabitable even by them. Mikhail wasn't sure he wanted to drag his crew through the metaphysical. He decided to stick with the concrete facts.

  "What's more, the humans here consider the seraphim as holy beings. Ethan Bailey, most likely, believes that angels are speaking to him, giving him commands."

  "Can we trust the crew of the Rosetta if that's the case?" Kutuzov glanced to Turk for the answer.

  Turk darkened. Mikhail expected him to say 'no' after his fight with Captain Bailey. But Turk looked away, and gave an unbiased accounting. "There was no reason for them to lie to me about Ethan's activities; we all thought that the Svoboda had sunk. Their radio was broken, so they couldn't have known the truth. They've had been out of contact with Ethan from when Paige—Captain Bailey bought the Rosetta and left Ya-ya, nearly two years ago. They thought he was here in Ya-ya translating. He contacted them when they were in Georgetown Landing and asked for them to meet him and their cousin's boat, the Lilianna, at Fenrir's rock to do salvage on a ship in minotaur waters."

  "What Eraphie Bailey told us confirms most of that." Mikhail said for Turk's sake. "Ethan was working independent of his family and called them in without giving them all the details of what he was working on—and that lead to the deaths of Lilianna's crew."

  "Ethan Bailey was working with the nefrim though?" Kutuzov said.

  "Yes," Mikahil said. "But we don't know what the nefrim's agenda is."

  "Kill. Destroy. Leave things in ruin." Turk growled.

  "That fits the description of Fenrir's Rock." Kutozov said.

  "There seems to be simpler ways of destroying a landing," Mikhail said.

  "Every landing will probably have an engine," Tseytlin pointed out. "And if the humans think they're escaping this place, they'll be more than willing to do the work for 'the angels.' It's an insidious trap if you ask me."

  Mikhail shook his head. "It feels too subtle for nefrim."

  If it wasn't for the visual evidence, he wouldn't believe that they were dealing with nefrims at all. What the Hak told them felt like the truth: the race had been cleanly divided into the ethereal benign seraphim and the corporeal malevolent nefrim. "Captain Bailey felt as if the notes she collected from her brother's workshop showed two agendas."

  "I'm not making much headway in understanding these notes." Tseytlin was leafing through the papers. The engineering Chief rubbed at his temple as if the paper was giving him a headache. "I've studied what United Colonies High Command gave us on Fenrir's engine and I—I don't think I can recreate this work, not without years of work, the help of Baileys' mechanic and one of them translating. A minotaur who knows what the hell it's doing would be helpful too. The ones we have know nothing."

  Which was what Mikhail was afraid Tseytlin would say. Said minotaurs thundered overhead. The newest game introduced to them was kick ball.

  "Why do we have these minotaurs onboard?" Lidija Amurova interrupted. She'd been the crewmember assigned to 'ride herd' on the minotaur children, as Captain Bailey put it. "Surely someone in the city knows more than I do about how to treat them."

  "I want to gather as much information as possible on these aliens," Mikhail said. "The human ships seem to be grouped together based on what star system they were trying to jump into when they were lost. In the Sargasso, the minotaur landings are close enough to trade with. It's possible that in our universe, we could make contact with the minotaurs."

  "We have enough trouble with the nefrim," Ensign Inozemtsev muttered. Mikhail had included him despite his demotion from Red Commander to Turk's second-in-command. Despite his fight with Captain Bailey, Turk might decide to stay with the Rosetta when the Svoboda chased after Hardin.

  "The minotaurs might be our ally against the nefrim." Mikhail pointed out. "For all we know, they might even be fighting with the nefrim on another front."

  They thought about it and nodded as the implications soaked in.

  Mikhail steered them away from the minotaurs and back to Ethan Bailey's notes. "The question is: is there evidence that we're looking at two divergent agendas?"

  Tseyltin blew out his breath and started to leaf slowly through the papers, laying them out in piles. After a minute, he nodded slightly. "I think there are three actually, or to be more specific, there's the original start point, and then the two branches. The start point is this pile." He placed a hand onto it. "It has nothing to do with warp engines. They're obviously building an experimental device, using scientific methods, and keeping close track of their attempts and failures. It's from this work that I got the idea for the sensors. They seem to be attempting to interact with the invisible nefrims but the focus was on audio, not visual."

  "Nefrim talking, that would be a first," Inozemtsev said.

  It would. Humans had never detected up communication between the nefrim ships or had even been able to establish that the nefrim used language. If the seraphim were nefrims, and Ethan Bailey had learned their language, that in itself would be important information.

  "This pile." Tseyltin tapped the second stack of papers. "They're all warp engine information. There are huge jumps in logic missing. Like all their no-brainers have been left out. I'm guessing that every . . .being . . . that worked on this part was on familiar grounds. There was no need to grapple with translations
on paper."

  "That leaves these." Tseyltin motioned to the smallest pile. "They're so cryptic, it like they're nearly written in code."

  Mikhail shifted the pile to in front of Ensign Moldavsky. "I believe you're the expert on cryptology."

  Moldavsky winced but nodded. She started to leaf through the papers.

  "This supports what we've been told," Mikhail said. "Ethan was working on communicating with the seraphim. Project number one. He has a breakthrough and Hardin gets involved . . ." Mikhail paused to consider the facts. "Hardin gets involved because Ethan's next project for the seraphim is developing a working warp drive."