by Martin Tays
Stealing
Endeavour
Book one of Forever Endeavour, Amen:
The Endeavour Trilogy
by
Martin Tays
Stealing Endeavour
Copyright © 2017 by Martin Tays
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.
Cover art by Seth Pritchard
Cover design by M. Crowe
Interior design by M. Crowe
Title typeface is Gabo Drive, created by Dannci/Daniel Kr.
www.martintays.com
Lyrics from Mary Jane's Last Dance, written by Thomas Earl Petty, copyright 1993 by Gone Gator Music, all rights reserved.
Lyrics from Closer, written by Michael Trent Reznor, copyright 1994 by Penny Farthing Music, all rights reserved.
Lyrics from Dancin’ Floozy, written by Running Deer Sidhathra Schwartz, copyright 2287 by Throwaway Gag Productions, all rights reserved.
Lyrics from But Not For Me, written by Ira Gershwin, copyright 1930 by Ira Gershwin Music, all rights reserved.
Lyrics from Anarchy Burger, written by Joseph Patrick Escalante, copyright 1994 by KungFu Records, all rights reserved.
Lyrics from Cuban Pete, written by Joseph Norman, copyright 1936 by Usi A Music Publishing, all rights reserved.
Lyrics from Sloop John B, from traditional Bahamian folk song John B. Sails, transcribed by Richard Le Gallienne 1916.
Lyrics from Bohemian Rhapsody, written by Freddie Mercury, copyright 1975 by Glenwood Music Corporation, all rights reserved.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all who encouraged and helped put this together. However, that would take far more room than I have to do so. But I at least want to thank Dani and Eytan Kollin, Karen Anderson, Jason Brezinski, Richard Costas, Amber Lind (a.k.a. The Editron 3000), my excellent cover artist Seth Pritchard, and of course Misty Crowe, who provided the cover layout, the ebook conversions, the occasional backrub and the encouragement I needed to finish. Thank you, all.
Dedication
To Misty, of course. I couldn’t have finished it without her, and would not have wanted to try.
Chapter 1
“We grow neither better or worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.”
May L. Becker
Moses always hated this part.
It wasn’t the sensation that bothered him ― there wasn’t any. Nor was it the view. If one discounted the fact that the area seen through the face of the Thorne-Visser Transitional Cube was of a place light years away it looked just like any other view of space.
Boring.
It was just the idea of it. A box of nothing, defined by pseudostring of exotic matter. A cube of negative energy, Casimir space bound by superstring and theory to an identical box nearly four light years away. Not a wormhole as much as a backdoor, through which a step in the right direction moved you to a completely different star system.
It kind of creeped Moses out.
The passenger lounge of the Grissom was located on the forward edge of the number one habitat ring, under the forward curve of the hull. Only the bridge of the huge liner had a better view of the universe.
Not that it mattered ― most of the passengers had ignored it, uncomfortable with zero gee and preferring to just sleep out the trip through the gate. The room had been empty when he had floated in, just a few minutes after the hab ring had been spun down for maneuvering.
Moses floated bonelessly. He was a totally average looking man. Brown hair swept back sensibly in a short ponytail, a scruffy beard that could stand a trim, a distant look in his tired hazel eyes, a tan shipsuit that was not ratty with the current self-repairing, self-cleaning fabrics, but certainly plain. He idly studied the view through the armorplex window, trying to locate the edges of the jump box. As usual, he failed. He took another sip from his drink.
“Isn’t it beautiful?”
He didn’t ― quite ― spew rum and coke through his nose. Fairly certain that he was the only person on the liner with enough interest to view the transition, Moses was startled by the pleasant feminine voice from behind him. He turned to look, grabbing a handrail as he did so to avoid spinning off into the lounge.
Behind him floated a woman. No, a girl. Living in a society of agelessness — of functional immortality, really — Moses knew plenty of women who looked this young. This girl felt it. He wouldn’t put her much past forty, possibly even younger. A child, really.
She was dressed sensibly enough, with a crisp one-piece coverall of white piped dark navy and soft grippy shoes. Red hair, pulled back into what could only be described as a mass on the back of her head, framing a maniacally grinning freckled face. An upside down one, at that, since she had one foot extended to allow a grippy to adhere to the closest bulkhead, the one over his head. The effect, even to a veteran spacer like him, was still a bit disconcerting.
Moses shook himself mentally and replied with every bit of dignity he could muster: “Wait… what?”
The girl pushed off from the bulkhead and drifted over beside him. She grabbed the bar by the view port and rotated in place to orient herself as he was. The mass of red hair turned, a half a beat late, behind her head and then oscillated distractingly.With her free hand, she pointed out toward the portal.
“That. It’s beautiful, don’t you think?”
Moses turned and looked. There were stars, and in a square directly in front of them there were, well, other stars. And at the edge of the square, there was… something. A place where the ordinary laws of the physical universe shook their Euclidean heads and muttered darkly. An angstrom-thin line that defined the edges of the cube and connected it to an identical box in a system light years distant. Trying to see that edge, the pseudostring that bound the portal ends together, was like trying to taste purple. It made your eyeballs sweat.
“Beautiful. Huh.” He turned from the window and shrugged. “Okay, sure, why not. It’s beautiful.”
She cocked her head to one side, studying the expression on his face. “Are you humoring me?”
“Yep.” Moses nodded, matter of factly.
He decided he liked her laugh. It was loud, it was sudden, it was a bit obnoxious and completely spontaneous. It sounded a bit like a clown exploding. You had to either like it or strangle her.
“I’m Moses.” He stuck his hand out. “No relation.”
“I know.” The slim girl reached out and solemnly shook his hand, holding it just a beat longer than strictly necessary before letting it go. Moses wasn’t bothered at all.
He smiled. “Then you have me at a disadvantage.”
“Yep.”
Moses turned to look at her. “Well, thank you, Calvin Coolidge.”
She blinked. “That was an obscure historical reference.”
“I also juggle.” He shook his almost empty drink tube. “Join me, oh mystery girl?”
“Mystery girl? Damn, I like that. Now I’m never going to tell you who I am.” She grinned as she pushed off toward the autobar.
Moses watched her drifting away, admiring the effortless ease with which she snagged the handle by the bar and flipped to a halt by it. He grinned himself, a bit ruefully. “I’m losing this co
nversation, aren’t I?”
The girl spoke in a low tone to the autobar, then grabbed the two drink tubes that emerged. She pushed back off in his direction, handing one over toward him as she came to a halt again by the window. “Taste that, and tell me.”
He glanced at the unmarked tube. “This is a rum and coke, isn’t it?”
“Does that answer your question?”
They both spoke at the same time. “Yep.”
She smiled and took a sip from the tube in her hand, then turned back toward the view port. Moses just stared at her, drink drifting forgotten by his side. Without looking back, she started talking.
“Your name is Moses Dunn. You were born on October 4th, 1957, which is why your parents nicknamed you ‘Sputnik’. You were the youngest crew member of the first ship to leave the solar system: the UESS Endeavour. Today is your four hundred and eighty seventh birthday.”She finally turned to look at him. She had drifted close enough that he could feel the heat of her breath. “You are the one hundred and twelve thousand, two hundred and seventeenth oldest human being alive.”
The transition warning alert hooted through the ship. He looked up, startled to discover how close they were to the gate. Grabbing the handle on the other side of the window, he put a little distance between them. “You forgot my hat size.” There was only a slight crack in his voice.
“Seven and a quarter, and you have a small tattoo of a flaming skull on your right bicep. I think it’s quaint.”
She pushed herself off parallel to the window, coasting over to him and stopping herself by planting a hand on his chest. Before she could drift back, she gripped his shirt, pulling him close. “My name is Amelia ― Ami, to my friends ― Verducci. I’m forty two years old. I’m leaving the Earth system for the first time ever, to meet a group of school friends on Haven. My mother is a history writer. She named me after the aviator, and gave me a horribly disproportional sense of history ― disproportionate enough to understand that crack about Coolidge. I don’t know what my hat size is, and I have no tattoos. I am pretty much fascinated by pretty much the entire universe, I want to see everything, and I never want to die.”
She abruptly pulled him close and kissed him. Her lips tasted like cinnamon. She pulled back and looked into his stunned eyes. “And I love you.”
Outside the view port, the universe moved.
☼
Light years away, there was a flash of ― call it, for want of a better word, ‘light’ ― as the pride of the Collins Line, the UEMS Virgil Grissom, emerged from transit. The cube shrank abruptly as energy equal to the mass of the transiting ship was sucked from the pseudostring, then slowly regained its normal shape.
In the bow of that ship was a window, through which the marvels of the transition and the wonders of the universe were being utterly ignored.
☼
“You’re crazy.”
She nodded. “Probably. ‘But it keeps me from going insane.’”
“You can’t just come in here and…” He paused. “Wait… Bob Dylan?”
“Waylon Jennings.”
“Right. You’re still crazy.” Moses hadn’t actually backed into a corner, but he held his still full drink in front of him, trained on the girl like a weapon.
She grinned and pointed at the drink tube. “Are you planning on shooting me with that?”
He glanced down, then shrugged as he looked back up at her. “I’ve got a rum, and I know how to use it?”
That laugh, again. It was hard to be scared of someone with that laugh. He had to grin along with her. “Okay, then.” He finally said. “Begin at the beginning and go on until the end.”
“And then stop?”
“And then stop. Thank you, Queen of Hearts.”
“Actually, I think it was the…”
“I don’t care,” Moses interrupted, gesturing impatiently. “Why do you know all that? Hell –- why do you care about all that?”
She looked over at him quizzically, then down at her drink. “You know, I tried liking rum and coke. I just couldn’t acquire a taste for it.”
“You’ve just got to drink enough of ‘em.” Moses waved his drink tube, then drained half of it in one quick motion. He looked out of the window, face tight. “God knows, I have.”
“Yeah.” In the background, a muted hooting warned of impending weight. Moses felt a slight shudder and a moment of queasiness as the habitat ring started spinning up. Inertia swayed the two of them around their grab bars like kelp in a current, then pulled them slowly down toward the floor.
Outside the window, the stars started moving as the hab ring began rotating around the engineering hub. Moses turned away, having always found the sight of the universe doing loops mildly disconcerting.
Ami smiled. “So. Refill?”
“Yes. No. Yes… no. Coffee, I think.” He walked off toward the autobar, then looked back at her. “Join me?”
A more real smile, now. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that.”
Now that there was a ‘down’ available, the autobar had dispensed with dispensing tubes. It produced real ― albeit lidded ― cups for their coffee. They each grabbed one and went over to a corner, trying to get away from the other passengers now beginning to wander in from the passageway.
Moses settled in and set his cup down, then gestured toward the opposite side of the booth. Ami sat, then looked at him levelly for a long moment while Moses cursed the still too hot coffee. Finally, she continued.
“I’ve always been a history nut.” She said, leaning back on the other side of the table and stretching her feet out to the seat across from her, to be gently held down by the induced third of a gravity of centripetal force. Diagonal from her and by her feet Moses hunched over his cup, staring into its depths.
He glanced up. “Why?”
“My Mother, as I said.” She shrugged. “At first, anyway. Then I realized that I actually liked it.”
“Not quite what I meant, but yeah… it’s weird that way. You look around and discover that you feel more connected with what happened than what’s happening. You prefer Xerxes to Xerox, as it were.”
Ami snorted. “That’s cute. Your line?”
“I honestly don’t remember, anymore.” He pointed a finger at her. “But we digress. The ‘why’ was this: why shouldn’t I consider you a stalker and run screaming into the night?”
“I don’t know.” She looked off. “I guess I am a stalker, if you get right down to it.”
“Ah.” Moses replied, nodding. “Goody.”
“But.” She turned back suddenly to look him in the eyes. “If you tell me to, I’ll walk out that hatch and never bother you again.”
“Huh.” Moses leaned back and stared over the table at his companion. She looked… vulnerable, now, as young as she really was.
She meant it.
Taking a sip of his coffee, he leaned back, then reached out to poke her in the side with his slipper shod foot. “So. Why me?”
“Quit it, I’m ticklish.” She grabbed his foot and settled it back on the bench beside her, leaving her hand on it as she answered his question. “Why you? ‘Cause you’re a history maker. Oh, you may not have been the first person to actually set foot on a planet circling another sun…”
“Oh. Oh, no…” Moses sat suddenly upright, pulling his foot out of her grasp. There was a horrified expression on his face.
“But you were to first to graffiti it.”
“Crap.” The motion of his head downward toward the table was almost stately in the low induced gravity of the habitation ring. There was a barely audible thud.
“Did you know it was still there?” She reached into her carryall. “I think I’ve got a picture of it here someplace…”
Moses began to thump his head methodically against the
table. “Please shoot me, now.” His voice was muffled.
“Honestly, I think reading about that is what made me fall in love with you.”
Moses stopped beating his head on the table, but didn’t otherwise reply.
Across from him, the girl smiled a small, very self conscious smile. “And when I saw that you were going out to Alpha Centauri again, I changed my trip schedule so… so I could finally meet you.”
Moses spoke to the table top. “’For a good time, call Ada Pinkins…’” He finally pulled his head up and looked across at the girl, embarrassed. “Look. How was I to know they were going to transmit live? We were three and a half light years away, for Christ’s sake. Who transmits a live signal that won’t be seen for three and a half years?”
“I’ve always wondered… why Ada Pinkins?”
Moses sighed. “Well, she was Director of Manned Spaceflight. It was funnier.”
“She certainly didn’t seem to think so.”
“Yeah. Ada was one of those people that couldn’t get a punch line if you nailed it to their foreheads.” He shrugged and leaned back again, putting his feet back up. He grinned ruefully as he took a sip of his coffee. “Well, I was a kid, really. You do stupid things when you’re a kid.”
“A kid. You were, what, a hundred and fourteen years old?”
“’Bout that. But I was a kid at heart. And an idiot.” He looked over at her critically. “You know, you remind me of me, a bit. Except for the… you know, breasts and all.”
