Eons Semester (The RIM Confederacy Book 8)

by Jim Rudnick

  “Oh,” she said and she pointed her empty fork at him, “you’ll need to come up with your best man and your groomsmen too. Bram?” she asked, and he nodded.

  No one else really—but then he thought about Admiral McQueen, and he knew he had to have a place for him too. Alver, Kondo, Craig from the Marwick, and even Ahanu from Throth came to mind, and he smiled as he took a sautéed scallop and added it to the half mouthful he already had partially been chewing on.

  “Not trying to upset you,” he started with, which got Helena to pull back her head and stare at him, “but do you think that the Issians had anything to do with this …” he said as he waved his own fork at her and him.

  She leaned back, grabbed a half glass of Chardonnay, and took a quick gulp before passing it to him.

  And she nodded.

  “I think that most of the RIM is under their … their … spell. Not control, but somehow that the Master and her Inner Circle do their best at the arranging of items for their benefit. Sometimes big—sometimes small. But yes, I did get the idea to send you here to Eons from my Gillian—my own Adept,” she said, as she searched in the big pot for more shrimps.

  He looked at her and nodded back. Agreed. The Issians were like puppet masters to a degree—not always right and unable to sometimes prevent some happenings especially when they came from outside the RIM.

  “Once this damn academy launch is over, you’ll be back on the Atlas—that suits, yes?” she asked, as she moved items around in the pot.

  He nodded and watched the woman whom he loved search for a shrimp.

  Finding one, she chortled and again tucked some rice on top and jammed it into her mouth.

  He put his fork down and leaned over to kiss her, and she had to stop chewing as they brushed lips.

  She pulled back, chomped the mouthful, swallowed it, tossed the fork over her shoulder, and leaned ahead into him for a real kiss.

  Bye-bye, jambalaya, he thought…

  CHAPTER NINE

  One of the best classes he’d ever been in, in his own naval academy days, was the one simply titled RECON.

  He remembered the professor who’d taught that class and his devotion to details and getting as much information as you could find, beg, borrow, steal, learn, study—the term didn’t matter. What did matter was that before any starship captain made a choice that his crew depended upon for their very lives—was that the captain had all the information that there was on that issue.

  All the information. No matter what the cost to acquire same, he’d been taught, which was why he now sat on a public shuttle cruiser, in a window seat in civvies, looking out the window. Checking in had been a snap. He showed his hard copy ticket or a screen on his tablet, and it was scanned and beeped, and he walked aboard the shuttle.

  From Eons up to its moon, Tavira, was only about a quarter of a million miles. The moon itself was of average size, which he’d learned from the vid that ran on the seat back in front of him, and only about two thousand miles in diameter. Gravity was about a sixth or so of Eons, which meant he would be able to jump a hundred feet or so—not that he’d ever be outside the dome where the AI controlled all including the gravity. No difference, the vid said, between walking on a street in Dessau or up on Aporia either.

  He smiled at the little girl who was on the other side of the empty seat beside him, and she blushed and looked away.

  Folks who wanted to see Aporia and the moon all took one of these quick shuttles up to the landing port there, and this one was like all the others. There was seating for about forty people and vid screens in the back of all the seats. A couple of flight attendants walked and chatted with passengers for the forty-minute flight. While he couldn’t see the bridge, he knew, as he’d checked on Gallipedia, that there were two pilots up there and an engineer who looked after the docking and such at both ends of the trip.

  Three chimes went off, and almost everyone jockeyed for a position to see out the windows.

  The video had said that when the shuttle was going to go through the ring that hung above Eons, the chimes would sound, and he too looked out the porthole window beside him.

  “Just a tourist looking out the window,” he said to himself.

  As the pilot had taken the shuttle to the inside edge of the ring, he could see that the man had aimed at slowly moving through the ring where there was a small break a few miles wide in the ice pellets. Made from water with a trace of metals, the ring was only a few hundred miles wide and was less than a mile in thickness. Each of those ice pellets, the vid had stated, was in sync with all the pellets around it. It was a ballet of shiny icy shards, pellets, and pieces from less than an inch across to less than twenty yards wide. Billions of them, it had been determined, lay in this ring and had done that for billions of years. Some had theorized that because of the existence of the ring, Eons had floated the ten or so lights outside of the galaxy. Others thought that the planet had moved there on its own and some other cataclysm had created those ice shards, which when they left the galaxy had been captured by the Eons gravity well.

  Didn’t matter to me, Tanner thought, as he and rest of the shuttle passengers oohed and ahhed as their ship went slowly through the glistening ice ring.

  “Nifty,” he said to himself and noted that once through, the pilot yawed to starboard and the ring dropped away quickly. The next stop was Tavira at the Aporia landing port. It took only about twenty more minutes, and Tanner couldn’t even feel the inertial dampeners, but the shuttle drifted first to port, then past the force field, and into the secure landing port in Aporia.

  Most of the other passengers were up, and the aisle was full of them clutching their carry-on bags, and he noted that even the little girl who he’d grinned at earlier carried what looked like a stuffed animal—a Jael, if he wasn’t mistaken. He shook his head at that choice … how someone who made toys for children would use a beast of an animal and make it look happy and pink was beyond him. He’d faced that creature years before with the duke on a private hunting party and had spent time afterward in a robo-doc recuperating.

  Still shaking his head, he rose, and with no carry-on bag, he waited for the lineup to exit in front of him before he even got into the aisle. He walked, following along, through the gate connector to the Aporia Station and then across the big marble floor of the arrivals lobby.

  “Recon,” he said to himself, as he went out the front doors to the lineups of robo-cabs and dome tour buses and thought about that for a second or two. He needed to learn as much as he could in the two hours before the shuttle trip back, so he got in the short lineup for one of the dome tours and paid his entry fee. It was one of those taller two-floor buses, and he went up to the top deck to get a seat and settle in. After only a few more minutes of loading other passengers, the bus started up, and it appeared the driver doubled as the person doing the explaining of what they saw.

  Pulling out of the landing port area, the bus was slowed down by the amount of arriving and departing traffic, but in ten minutes, it was slipping along the roadway leading ahead to the city of Aporia and its thirty thousand inhabitants. As the bus got closer, traffic did thicken a bit, Tanner noted, but the bus driver was pretty good and avoided a real slowdown ahead by judicious lane changes.

  As the bus turned onto one of the main streets of the city, the driver began his spiel on various facts about the city and its history.

  “Aporia, home for almost thirty-two thousand people, has a rich history which goes back three hundred years to its founding. Before that, the site was a simple scientific outpost that grew and grew for almost five hundred years on its own. But back three centuries, the Master Adept felt that a full city should be established here on the Eons moon—and Aporia the city was born,” he said.

  “Page two,” Tanner said to himself and then grinned at the scenery going by.

  “Aporia was designed to be twenty ridings of various locations and populations back then. Since, we’ve adjusted those riding boundaries
and have learned too how to modify the various zonings within so that the city as a whole is a success. Right now, we are in Riding Number Nine, and as we approach the city’s major downtown shopping area, we’ll move over to Riding Number Seven.”

  As the bus went on, the driver went on too—telling stories about the city and its past. He did, however, take a stop in front of the Aporia City Hall, and he explained about the current roster of riding representatives and the mayor too.

  Must have been on the mayor’s payroll, Tanner thought, as the driver glowingly painted a picture of a hardworking, passionate man who ran city council to make Aporia great.

  Starting up, the driver swung to the left at the next big street intersection, and for a while, all Tanner could see was shops and stores with sidewalk displays of various goods, trinkets, and souvenirs. Guessing that there would be a stop here, he was happy to see that he was right, and he got off with everyone else to look at the items. He did find a great little knick-knack—the Aporia dome and the city lay inside, and if you shook it, the dome was suddenly filled with snowflakes. It made him chuckle and he bought it and tucked it into a coat pocket.

  Back on the bus, the driver took off to go to the very edge of the dome and turned on what was called Dome Boulevard, which he explained ran all the way around the inside of the dome for the full five miles across the diameter. On the left of the bus, the dome itself curved down to sit on a large metal framework that was at least a dozen feet tall. On the right of the bus, across the street from the dome side, ran houses all the way down the block as the road curved always to the right.

  He spoke at some length about the various safeguards to the dome architecture as well as what would happen if the dome AI detected a breach in the dome. There had never been one, but being prepared was always a good thing the driver said, and Tanner, like others sitting around him back on the top deck, nodded in agreement.

  The bus went slowly and the driver suddenly said, “We have a question from a passenger about the numbering of the houses along the street to your right. As she has noted, they all for the past few blocks start with a two—there’s Two-dash-four-five-two-nine and then next here is Two-dash-four-five-three-one. As you can tell, the first digit is the riding—we’re in Riding Number Two right now. And all of the street addresses are then in numerical order, odds too in this riding.”

  Good, Tanner thought, got that too.

  The bus motored along and the driver filled them up with more news about the dome, its perfect record of no dome breaches, and how the AI was the best on the moon—or Eons too, he noted.

  Trusting AI was fine—but only, as all navy men knew, if you had a backup plan ready to roll out if the AI went south.

  The bus chugged along, turned ahead at the large light salmon-colored buildings, and slowed as they went by.

  “This complex—soon to be expanded, we hear—is the Aporia Medical Wards complex. Where any Eons citizen can go for medical aid for anything from a hangnail to a heart transplant. Been there myownself,” the driver said, “as I once fell and broke my ankle—they fixed me up. Robo-doc time was at a minimum, and I was home for dinner that day.”

  As the bus began to speed up a bit to leave the complex behind, the driver said, “We have another question from a passenger, and I really do not have an answer. Seems he was watching the local vid channel a few days back and saw something about terrorists being in charge of the MedWards—something I really doubt, Sir. Maybe you should ask the vid channel for a full explanation … just some crackpot, I figure …” the driver said as his voice trailed off.

  And that, Tanner thought, was about how much notice the world had paid to this Kendal Steyn and her video of her twin too.

  He knew this was an item that needed more recon, but if the real world people thought this was a conspiracy theory only by crackpots, it might just die on its own.

  He continued to look out at the moon dome scenery as the bus driver turned toward the landing port—back to Eons soon…

  #####

  As her mind joined the Inner Circle group’s meld, it hit her as always like a freight train ... one instant she was alone on her sofa in her quarters, and the next she was falling down a cavernous black hole—a shaft that seemed to go on and on forever, making nausea come on suddenly.

  Then below as she fell, she saw light ... a pinpoint, but still there was light below.

  She had always tried to swim toward it, but she still couldn't feel her arms as she tried to stroke toward that light, so she knew to relax and watch as the light below grew from that pinpoint to a tiny spotlight to a brighter and brighter larger ball of light.

  And still the light grew until it was all around her as the blackness receded above her head.

  Expectedly, she heard whispers ... many, many voices whispering at her in a language she thought she almost knew but could just not make out the meanings. Those whispers grew and then grew more, intertwining, linking, and building on each other until they were whispers no more but now shouts and shrieks and screams and screeches.

  And the mind link was complete, and the Master had just joined in to complete the Inner Circle—the leaders of the Issians.

  “We welcome you, Master Adept,” all of the minds said in unison, and she nodded back to them even though they couldn’t see that motion.

  “We have only one topic for today,” the Master Adept said, “and that is the growing issue about Kendal and Mariam and how they might affect our future path.” She fussed for a moment with her small broach of the winged planet that she always put on the bodice of her black robes and then smiled at them all.

  “I know—I know. Kendal is not really a threat as yet. But you have seen what I have seen—and the fact is that if she does maintain her initiative of showing Mariam on that video to RIM citizens—and perhaps to the heads of state on their way here now for the academy opening—the problem gets much worse for us. Much worse. We have too many other irons in the fire, as they say, for our path ahead to grow muddy with old issues. Old mistakes. Counsel here is what I need,” she finished off and leaned back.

  The talk went round and round.

  As every single mind in the link was the mind of a twin, they were all very much aware of the problems of one like Kendal and what she could do. Each had lost a twin via the Inner Circle culls, and each was more superior for just that reason. Each was knowledgeable of what it had taken to get to this level, and each was aware of what it might take to stay at this level of being the elite of the Issian race.

  One suggested a simple matter of a moon dome leak—a stray meteor that could pierce the dome and plow right into Kendal's home, ending the problem simply. But that was too random, all had agreed, as the path of that asteroid would have to be aimed by a skilled marksman, but none present was such a marksman enough to ensure no collateral deaths.

  One suggested a simple traffic accident, but that was nixed because accidents often are just that, so there was no way to ensure that the correct person was killed.

  One suggested poison—a simple spritz or a bump on the bus and Kendal would be gone. That one they could do, and that one they liked enough that it was the leading item to rid the Inner Circle of the threat.

  More ideas were suggested but it was not until the last inner circle member, Gloria Patel, spoke that they all knew they’d heard good counsel.

  “If the issue is that Kendal will try to disrupt the academy opening, then let’s just make it impossible for her to get down to Eons. Make sure she can’t buy a shuttle ticket or disable the ship if needs be. That to me is more our style than what I’ve heard so far,” she said with her mind quietly.

  Swelling talk around that ensued, and moments later the Master Adept thought right out loud.

  “And I agree, too, with Gloria. Most fitting attempt that will be the most hands-off approach that I agree is also more of our own way of doing things. Then we shall simply keep Kendal off Eons. No presence means she can’t ambush the heads of state a
t the big event, and that is what this is all about, correct?”

  Murmurs of consent from each member went through the mind link, when Gloria broke in one more time.

  “In the future—the near future, I would think—we will need to think about what to do with Mariam too. We should plan what needs to be done and ensure that our plan is both workable—as well as it comes to an end. Else we may face Kendal again and again …”

  Again, consent was thought throughout the Inner Circle.

  The Master said her goodbyes and asked only Gloria to remain linked to her. The rest of the Inner Circle un-linked and disappeared.

  “Good to see that our backup is still in play, Master,” Gloria said, and her mind bowed slightly to her Master, who nodded back.

  “Yes, he has no idea yet, but if we need him, Captain Scott will aid us—as far as is necessary. This I do know,” the Master Adept said and smiled.

  The next Master Adept, Gloria nodded and took her leave, and the current Master Adept nodded now to an empty room.

  Seems like the best way to proceed, she thought, seems like the best way…the meteor idea would be serviceable for them…

  #####

  The analytics did not lie.

  No way that the number of views of the vid of Mariam had been tampered with, Kendal thought. Only a bit short of two hundred Aporians had logged in to watch the video. Less than two hundred citizens had learned what their Issian Inner Circle was up to. And less than two hundred people cared—but not a single comment had been registered. Two hundred out of more than thirty thousand inhabitants.

  Probably scared—as the vid was about the Inner Circle and how they were terrorists—and no one would make a comment, pro or con, as that would show that they’d actually seen the video. Couldn’t hide behind anonymity.