Chaos Quarter

by Welch, David

  Rex focused on the speed, .08C. The fighters should be dropping off about now. He heard the click of the trigger as Lucius squeezed it again. In the radar sphere a second dot disappeared. The remaining dots fell farther and farther behind.

  “We are beyond the apparent range of their weapons,” the computer informed him.

  “Damage?” Rex asked.

  “We have lost some armor, dorsal-side stern,” it replied.

  He let out a long breath, staring into the space in front of him. As Long Haul topped out at .1C, one-tenth the speed of light, the stars distorted a little. Beside him, Lucius, still eerily calm, removed the visor. Behind him, Chakrika’s breath came and went in panicked breaths.

  “Why the hell am I in space!” she roared after a silent beat. Rex turned to face her. She glanced down at the child in her arms.

  “And why did you kidnap the governor’s son!” she screamed.

  “I did nothing of the sort,” Lucius replied.

  Rex looked closer at the child. Caramel skin covered his squirming form, far lighter than that of his late mother.

  “So that’s why you were so eager to get away,” Rex remarked.

  “Your arrival was fortunate. I had been planning to steal a ship,” Lucius stated.

  Rex let out a snarky laugh. “That’s why I’m here, to save the day. Can’t ever trade with Igbo again, but hey, who cares.”

  “I am sorry for that,” Lucius replied. “But not for what was done. Had I remained—”

  “Her husband might have killed you?” Rex replied.

  Lucius’s face darkened, then he said, “And my lover. And my son.”

  Rex sighed, rubbing at his eyes. Chakrika stomped over to Lucius, thrusting his child into his arms. He held the baby uncomfortably, not sure what to do.

  “Try hugging him close to your body,” Rex said, the cries grating on his nerves.

  Lucius hugged the infant awkwardly. Chakrika groaned and took the infant back from him.

  “Spirits help you!” she spat and began rocking the infant. His cries slackened.

  “I, uhm—” the erudite Euorpan stuttered.

  “OK,” Rex said loudly. “We have six hours until we’re far enough to jump—”

  “I ain’t jumping anywhere—” Chakrika began.

  “We have six hours until we’re far enough to jump. Deal with it however you want, this ship isn’t going back to Igbo!” Rex snapped.

  Chakrika glowered and instinctively cuddled the child closer to her chest.

  “I suggest we go to the common room and sort this out,” Rex continued.

  Neither moved; they just stared uneasily at each other. Rex rolled his eyes.

  “OK, I order you to the common room. Better?”

  “I’m not your crew—” Chakrika began to protest.

  “No. But you are on my property so get to the damn common room,” he repeated.

  She steamed up and then stomped off, fuming.

  “No wonder you have to pay for sex!” she snapped as she went.

  “You’re nowhere near as good as you think you are!” Rex shouted after her.

  Rex slumped back against his chair. The kinks she had worked out last night had returned in record time.

  “She was why you excused yourself from the banquet?” Lucius asked.

  Rex shrugged, “She’s a lot nicer when she’s on the clock.”

  * * *

  Rex drummed his fingers on the cold steel of the table. It dominated the common room. Bare metal walls surrounded it, broken by the pipes and conduits running laterally across or up to the ceiling. It was spartan in the way only a man could love.

  Rex sat at the table’s head, Chakrika and Lucius at his immediate left and right. Chakrika still held the baby. Lucius stared at the child. There was compassion in his eyes, if not in his stern visage.

  “Here is how I see it,” Rex started, focusing on Chakrika. “I can either drop you somewhere or hire you on.”

  Her eyes went wide.

  “Hire me? Trader, you can’t afford me.”

  “I’m not really a trader. One silver bit a day,” Rex replied.

  “One silver bit!” she nearly exploded. “If you think I’d fuck either of you for—”

  “You won’t be fucking anyone,” Rex growled. “You said you can cook. I can’t, and I’m willing to bet culinary arts weren’t in the education of our wayward nobleman.”

  “Even so! I can make ten times that in one night!”

  “And I’ll be docking an extra silver bit a week from Lucius’s pay for you.”

  “What?” Lucius spoke, “Why would you do that?”

  “Somebody has to feed your kid,” Rex replied.

  Chakrika shot to her feet.

  “You expect me to breastfeed his child?!”

  “For an extra bit a week. We’re not gonna find much formula on these worlds.”

  “I’m not even lactating!” she asserted.

  “I have the medical facilities to correct that,” Rex continued.

  She was about to scream again, but stopped.

  “What? How? I’m not getting pregnant just to feed—”

  “That would take too long, anyway. Besides, I have an advanced sick bay.”

  Lucius eyed him suspiciously. Chakrika didn’t understand what was going on.

  “What is it?” she asked the Europan. “Why are you looking at him like that?”

  Lucius replied to Rex rather than Chakrika.

  “How does an outdated ship this far from the Commonwealth have the medical technology that you are hinting at?”

  “It doesn’t,” Rex replied. “But a rebuilt ship sent out by the Commonwealth fleet does.”

  Now Lucius shot to his feet.

  “You are a spy!” the Europan declared.

  Rex laughed, leaning back in his chair.

  “Hardly. They sent me out to explore, so I’m exploring.”

  Lucius paused, thinking.

  “Yet you hired me anyhow. Your superiors would incarcerate you for this,” he pointed out.

  “My superiors pretty much sent me out here to die, so I’m not really all that concerned about their opinions.”

  “Wait,” Chakrika spoke, looking to Rex. “You’re a Terran?”

  “He is,” Lucius spoke.

  “Really?” Chakrika continued.

  “Yes,” Rex confirmed, giving her a quizzical look. “You’ve never seen one before?”

  “Few people out here have,” Lucius spoke, retaking his seat. “They have the technology to do what he says.”

  “Huh?” Chakrika said, then snapped out her astonishment. “That doesn’t mean I'm going to—”

  “He’ll die if you don’t. I could force you to do it, but that would just make me a bastard,” Rex explained.

  Chakrika stewed, pacing back and forth with the child. After several dirty glances, she sat back down.

  “Two bits extra,” she replied.

  “Deal,” Rex replied.

  Lucius started in, “It’s my pay, don’t I have a—”

  “No,” replied Rex.

  Chakrika’s eyes narrowed, focusing on Lucius.

  “How much are you paying him?” she asked.

  “Two gold bits a week,” Rex replied. “Minus the two bits silver, of course.”

  “Two bits gold?!” Chakrika protested.

  “Gunner is more important than cook,” Rex said with a shrug. “Besides, you’ll love the health plan.”

  …You hear lots of rumors about the space beyond the Achaean Confederacy. Aliens, intelligent machines, genetic freaks, brainwashed super-soldiers…on and on and on. Every year there are new documentaries on the What-If Channel about what’s out there, featuring all the latest conspiracy theories and the cranks that promote them. The truth is that nobody in the Commonwealth knows what’s going on out there. It takes months to cross the Quarter, so whatever information we get has usually changed hands a few times, making it of questionable reliability. We wou
ld dismiss it all as meaningless if it weren’t for one reoccurring story: nobody comes back. Time and time again we’ve heard, from the Achaeans, the Valhallan Norse, and the various Chaos Quarter states in the region, that people who enter this space do not return. Something is going on out there. So we could ignore it, but I would suggest otherwise. If you remember once upon a time, people thought Sasquatch was a myth. Now we have human rights organizations suing the government, claiming it’s wrong to keep them in zoos because they’re “sentient” beings…

  -Johan Maxwell, author and political pundit, on a late-night talk show, 2496

  Somewhere between the Igbo and Daltheen Systems, Chaos Quarter

  Standard Date 10/29/2506

  They filed into the sick bay. Rex motioned Chakrika and Lucius to the low-lying beds. They sat down on them, while he stood near a computer console on the wall opposite the door. Banks of machines the size of a man hung from the ceiling above the beds. Tubes and wires emerged from them, disappearing into the ceiling. Small glass scanner eyes lined their undersides. Chakrika examined them warily while gently rocking the baby.

  “All-purpose scanners,” Rex explained.

  She raised an eyebrow in confusion.

  “They figure out what’s wrong with you. Saves me from having to lug a medic around,” he continued.

  “They’re smaller than our—the empire’s version,” Lucius noted.

  “Zioni design,” Rex replied. “They build good stuff.”

  “What services do you require?” the computer spoke. Her voice spooked Chakrika, who looked around anxiously.

  “A bunch,” Rex said, removing three cotton swabs from a compartment. He walked up to Chakrika.

  “Open your mouth,” he ordered.

  “Why?” she said nervously.

  “If I don’t have your DNA, the computer can’t prepare the medicine to make you lactate and keep that baby alive,” he replied.

  She reluctantly opened her mouth. He swabbed the inside of her check and then dropped the swab back in the compartment. He did the same with the baby, then Lucius. Though not for reasons of lactation.

  “You’re going to be using nanobots, aren’t you?” Lucius asked after he was swabbed.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “A nanobot? Like they use in terraforming?” Chakrika said, uncertainty thick in her voice. “Are they safe?”

  “His people use them for everything,” Lucius told her. Rex busied himself on the console. He hummed to himself as it prepared the nanobots.

  “What, uh, what will they do? To me?”

  “Couple of things,” Rex said. The machine chirped. Rex opened a low compartment. Prepared syringes sat inside, color-coded.

  “Chakrika’s is blue,” the computer informed Rex.

  Rex removed four syringes, placing them on a small table in the center of the room. He pulled up a stool beside Chakrika’s bed and lifted the first syringe.

  “One shot. Should take four hours.”

  “How—how does it work?” she asked, staring anxiously at the syringe.

  “Microscopic robots in this syringe are programmed to stimulate your mammary glands. You’ll begin producing milk, and this little guy, who probably should get a name at some point, will be able to eat. He should be pretty hungry by then too.”

  “The machines won’t eat me from inside out?”

  Rex laughed. Lucius smiled, but quickly hid it behind his generic stern visage.

  “They don’t ‘eat’ anything. Once you’re producing milk, they’ll deactivate and will be removed from your body like any other waste. All right?” he asked.

  She thought for a long moment and then nodded weakly. Rex injected the syringe into her shoulder and pressed down on the plunger. He removed the syringe and tossed it into the garbage.

  “Done,” Rex said.

  “Thank you,” Lucius said solemnly.

  “All right. So what’s this health plan?” she said, some of her sass returning. “Better be damn good for the pay cut I’m taking.”

  “You do realize that you don’t have to have sex for money anymore?” Rex asked.

  “Maybe I like sex,” she replied, her heart not in it.

  “Nobody likes handing their body over to another like that,” Lucius spoke, the seriousness of his tone catching Rex’s attention. “Even if raised to think so. Whether you appreciate his actions or not, he has done well by you.”

  “Uh…thanks,” Rex said, genuinely surprised. “Now, Chakrika, this health plan is the best thing that will ever happen to you, I guarantee it. Three more injections for each of us, and we’ll be done.”

  “Three more injections?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Computer, tell them what’s going to happen,” Rex spoke, moving to his stool.

  “Gerontological treatment. Rex, you are seven days overdue. It is estimated you have lost between twelve and sixteen hours of potential life—”

  “I probably would have wasted it anyway,” Rex said with a dismissive wave. “ Now tell them how this works.”

  “You will be given the standard yearly update treatment. The first step is an injection on nanomachines programmed to attack and destroy free radicals, viruses, bacteria, and any other harmful microscopic organisms. The second step is the injection of nanomachines programmed to repair damaged cells and DNA. The third step is a chemical injection that slows the degradation of your cellular tellemir chains. The cumulative effect will be to render you immune to 99.7 percent of all known forms of sickness and reduce the aging process by one half.”

  “What?” Chakrika asked.

  “You can actually do that?” Lucius asked. “There were rumors in the empire, but nobody thought anything of it, considered it Commonwealth propaganda.”

  Rex smiled, asking, “How old do you think I am?”

  “Twenty-seven,” Chakrika replied confidently. “I can always tell.”

  “That’s what I would say as well,” Lucius spoke. “But I sense that you’re about to surprise us.”

  “Fifty-four standard years,” Rex replied.

  Chakrika stared, her mouth gaping. Lucius laughed, shaking his head.

  “Are you saying that-that we’re not gonna grow old?” Chakrika asked.

  “Not as quickly. The treatments slow the rate of aging, doubling your lifespan.”

  “So you got the body of a twenty-seven-year-old?” Chakrika figured.

  “Yes. And if I manage to survive this assignment, I probably have another century of life ahead of me,” Rex explained.

  “But if this treatment is yearly, we’ll only be gaining an extra year of life,” said Lucius.

  “True. But I figure if we survive long enough, I can probably sponsor you for citizenship. Commonwealth is pretty easy-going about immigration. Though you might want to make up a fake life story, Lucius,” said Rex.

  “You would take me to the Commonwealth?” Chakrika asked hopefully.

  “Heck, why not. Consider it part of your pay,” Rex spoke. “Still want to go back to Igbo?”

  Chakrika held out a minute before slowly shaking her head.

  “Good. Let’s do this then.”

  He moved through steps one and two, injecting the nanobots into each of them and finishing with himself. Chakrika grinned like an excited girl, her wariness toward the microscopic robots long gone. Before the third step, he took out a small syringe, coded for the infant.

  “You want to retard his growth?” asked Lucius.

  “Just disease killers and cell repair. You don’t get the age treatment until you’re fully grown.”

  The baby wailed at the injection. Chakrika cooed to sooth him. She scratched at one breast.

  “They itch,” she spoke, “I suppose it’s working.”

  “Probably,” Rex said, taking off his shirt. They looked at him, odd expressions on their face.

  “It’s best to strip down to your shorts for part three. Side-effects of the drug, gives you one hell of a hot flu
sh.”

  “For how long?” Chakrika asked.

  “Twelve hours or so. Back home you usually spend the day in a clinic naked in a cold bath. Don’t have the water for that here.”

  Down to his boxers, Rex dropped to his stool. Lucius slowly removed his outer clothing, making sure that his face reflected his displeasure at this. Chakrika pulled off her short skirt and top, sitting naked on the bed, drawing Lucius’s gaze.

  “We left in a hurry! I didn’t have time to go back and throw on some underwear!” she spoke, more an accusation than an explanation.

  “Nothing I haven’t seen,” Rex smirked and then retrieved the chemical treatment from a compartment on the wall. “Decrease room temperature to sixty degrees Fahrenheit.”

  The air began to cool. Goose bumps pebbled their skin. Rex administered the final injections, doing his own last. They sat for a moment, not noticing any difference. Then beads of sweat appeared on Lucius’s forehead, followed by Chakrika’s.

  “If you didn’t start the treatments until you were full grown, how have you gone thirty years and still look in your twenties?” Lucius spoke.

  “It’s not an exact process. Normally you look in your twenties until mid-fifties, thirties until your eighties, forties until one hundred or so, fifties up to one twenty, sixties to one forty, seventies and eighties up to one sixty. It’s not as effective in old age, so you do start aging a little faster after you hit a century.”

  “And how many years do we lose for starting this late?” Lucius asked.

  “What are you, twenty-five?” Rex asked.

  “Twenty-six,” Lucius corrected.

  “You’ll maybe lose a year or two. No huge deal. Same for Chakrika.”

  “I’m only nineteen,” she replied.

  “Really?” Rex asked, genuinely shocked. “You’re only nineteen?”

  “Yes,” she replied, her voice dark. “Why?”

  “Oh,” Rex said, looking supremely awkward. “If I’d known, I—”