by Martin Tays
Cath raised her hand and very gently touched her lips. She looked back at the retreating girl. When she spoke, her voice was full of quiet reverence.
“Wow.”
“Say you’re in a town in the middle of a vast desert. You decide to find out if you have any neighbors. So you pick a direction and you start walking.
And you walk, and you walk, and you walk, and you walk, and you find nothing but nothing. Eventually, you reach the point where you give up. You turn around, and you head back to town, and you desperately try to forget the fact that there’s no one out there. Anywhere.
It’d happen to any of us. And that’s why we’ve only explored twenty two systems.
Because we’re sick of the damn desert.”
Hermes Van Gelder, from “Right Stuff, Wrong Place”
Chapter 11
“Years and sins are always more than owned.”
Italian Proverb
“Sweetie… dear heart… darling…?”
Sher paused, then sighed and looked back toward Leo. “Okay. What did I do wrong?”
It was early afternoon, and the yellow light from Alpha Centauri was warm enough to keep most people in off the streets. They had the sidewalk pretty much to themselves as they made their way back from their shopping trip.
Leo looked a bit embarrassed. “Am I that obvious?”
Sher grinned and grabbed his arm, pulling him along as she began walking again. “Only to me and your sister.” She glanced over at him and added “Well, actually, maybe to Moses, too. He’s kinda spooky that way.”
“Yeah, true. But we digress.”
“Yep.”
He looked down at her as they strolled and mimicked her speaking to the salesman. “We’d like to buy two hundred kilos of transfer stabilized Oscillatoria, please, plus twenty aqueous flats of laminaria longicruris and another fifteen of palmaria palmata.”
“Hey, that was pretty good.”
“Thanks.”
She grinned. “You mispronounced longicruris, though.”
“I don’t particularly care. The problem… the problem is… huh. That’s funny.” The sun was in their faces as they walked, and his voice trailed off as he squinted up into it.
Leo was not a small man, and many people had assumed he was a slow lumbering individual because of it.
They were wrong.
Leo’s hands shot suddenly out into the air and clapped thunderously around what to Sher appeared to be thin air. He pulled his hands down and peeked carefully between his fingers. Without looking up, he whispered “Get me a box.”
Sher had several questions that went unasked. Instead, she squatted down on the sidewalk to dump the content of her carryall onto the ground. Pawing through them, she finally came up with a makeup container. She held it up. “Will this do?”
Leo glanced at it, then whispered “Got anything metal?”
She dropped the makeup box and grabbed a box of mints off the bottom of the pile. Leo looked down and nodded, never separating his hands, and she unsealed the box, dumped the contents, and held it out.
Leo glanced around. They were in front of a sidewalk café. He motioned with his head for her to follow and approached one of the tables. Standing there, he brought his hands down until they were almost touching the table, then separated them and smacked them both sharply onto the tabletop.
He then leaned down to squint at the surface of the table, then reached out and carefully picked up… something, with his thumb and forefinger. Sher extended the box, which he opened his fingers over. He then quickly snapped the lid shut, then took the box from her and stuck it into his shirt pocket.
Sher looked at his pocket, then at him, from under lowered brows. She then walked back and began raking the debris back into her carryall.
Leo strolled back and picked up the conversation as if nothing had happened. “So basically, you all but walked in there and told the guy ‘We’re stocking a starship, please, and I wanna buy some supplies for the life support system’.”
“Huh? Oh. Right. Big deal.” She shrugged. “We had money, dearie, and that’s all he cared about.”
He shrugged in return, then stuck his hands into his jacket pockets, extending his elbow out for her to grab. “Well, I just think that from now on you should be just a teeny bit more careful.”
Sher hooked her arm through his, then replied. “I will. And say… think I could ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“What the hell was THAT all about?!?”
“Hum?” He paused and looked at her. “Oh! That. I’ll show you when we get home. I can’t wait to see the look on Moses’ face.”
“Meany.”
“Yep.” Leo agreed, nodding.
“Oh! And don’t forget you owe me a box of mints.”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch.” Arm in arm, they strolled off down the sidewalk.
☼
Celestine Grace stood, arms akimbo, as he stared down at the prostrate technician.
Sam was curled into a tight little ball of agony, hands clutched over her ears. The headphones she’d just ripped off were lying on the floor between them.
“Well?” Grace began tapping his foot.
The tech didn’t open her eyes. She just curled up tighter. “Nugng…”
Grace sighed and squatted down. “Will you please explain this behavior?”
Sam finally opened her eyes. There was a certain unfocused look to them. “Bang.” She said, followed by “Clap” and “Owww,” in that order. She finally uncurled a bit and continued in a shaky voice. “I… I think…”
“You think what?”
“I think my eardrums just met in the middle of my head.” Carefully, jerkily, she pulled her hands down and sat up. She shook her head and immediately regretted it, then reached up and gingerly smacked her right ear with the palm of her hand. Looking over at Grace, she asked in a dazed tone of voice “Do you hear a bell?”
“No.”
“What?!”
Shaking his head, he shook his head.
“Damn. Okay, must be me.” She pointed at the side of her head. “Are there any brains coming out of my ears?”
Before he could stop himself, Grace looked, then growled. He picked up the headphones and handed them to the technician. Sam stared at them, wide eyed, then very carefully took them from his grasp. She made no effort to put them on.
“Look, Ms… look, you.” He pointed up to the console. “Get back up there and tell me what’s going on with your subjects.”
“What?”
“WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?”
Sam sighed and began to very slowly drag herself back up to sit at the console. She threw the headset down, dragged her hair out of her face, and turned to face her boss. “Fine. You don’t have to shout.”
Grace turned a very satisfactory shade of purple.
She ignored him and pointed to the console. “What happened? We just got caught.”
“I thought those units were undetectable?”
“Well you thought wrong then, didn’t you?” Sam was in no mood to be charitable. “The unit got between him and the sun, and he saw it. And that boy is quick.”
“So send the self destruct command.”
The tech shook her head, then winced. “Won’t do any good. Metal box, remember? Instant Faraday cage. It’ll block the signal. I told you that boy was quick. I wasn’t just referring to his dexterity.”
“So what will they be able to figure out from the unit?”
“Nothing they didn’t already know. They’re being watched.” Sam looked up at her boss. “Well, alright, they suspected it before… now they know.”
Grace stared at the console, fuming. He finally turned back to
her and growled. “This is all your fault.”
“Sure. Whatever.” She shrugged. “It shouldn’t affect us, though. We’re just going to have to be a little more careful when monitoring them, is all. After the new crew shows up I shouldn’t have any more problems like this.”
“You’d better not. Don’t screw up again. I’m warning you.” He turned and stormed out of the room.
Sam rested her head on the console. The pain had diminished to a dull throbbing. She finally dragged her pcomp out, scrolled to the medical programs, and keyed a command for a moderate pain killer. The program considered her request, reviewed her medical data, and finally beeped an acknowledgement. The headache began to slowly recede.
“My Mom wanted me to be a prostitute. My Dad wanted me to be a contract assassin. But noooooo… I had to be a surveillance technician.”
She finally sat up, blew the hair out of her face, and brought up the surveillance drone protocol. She instructed the drone at the top of the stack to stay at a much greater distance from the subjects and launched it.
Finally, she sat back, put her feet on the console, and stared blankly at the ceiling. She blew one more strand of hair out of her face and sighed. “I have got to reconsider my career options.”
☼
Rafe had finally managed to track down Moses. He’d apparently just gone up to his office on Romulus, ostensibly to get some of his salvage work done. Rafe waited patiently until the vid cleared and found himself looking at the somewhat cute, very young redheaded girl Moses had been drunkenly talking with on the ship.
She stared at him for a long moment, then turned to look off screen. “Moses? It’s the weasel fucking son of a bitch for you.”She then turned back to simply sit and glare, wordlessly, at him through the hookup.
A few seconds later, Moses came onto the screen to kiss the top of her head. Shooing her off, he dropped down into the chair and looked out at Rafe’s expression. “You know, you keep that up and your face is going to freeze that way.”
Rafe blinked, then opened his mouth to speak.
Moses held a hand up and shook his head before Rafe even got a chance to start. “Don’t. Trust me. You don’t want to know.”
By this point, Rafe’s eyebrow had crawled most of the way up his head. Moses smiled and looked off toward the girl. “I’ve never seen him speechless before. Good job. Dinner’s on me, tonight.”
“Yay!” Came from off screen, faintly.
Moses turned back and stared out at Rafe, a grim smile on his lips. “Well?” He said, finally.
Rafe shook his head. “I, um, I take it you’ve spoken with Cath?”
Moses nodded. “We had a chat, yes.”
Rafe pushed back from his desk and stared at the face in the vid window. “Listen.” He said, finally. “You know this has got to be done, and you know it’s got to be done this way, right?”
“You could have let me in on it from the beginning, Rafe.”
He shook his head. “No, I couldn’t have. Come on… would you have trusted you?”
Moses started to reply, then just shrugged and shook his head.
“All right, then.” Rafe continued, sighing. “Look, fine, I used you. I use a lot of people. It’s part of my job. Big deal. But when all is said and done, we’re going to have a functioning starship, again. An exploratory ship. Isn’t that worth it?”
“That depends on whether or not you’re the one who’s been used, I suppose.”
Rafe slapped the desktop. “God damn it, Moses!”
“Fine. Yeah. You’re right.” Moses pointed at him out from the screen. “And that’s twice I’ve made you curse. Go, me.”
Rafe leaned forward again, looking into the face in the vid window. “Okay. Okay, then. So long as we’re on the same page. What do you need?”
“Charts.” Replied Moses, now businesslike. “Maps, a full navigational download. Astronomers have probably collected a fair amount of data on that region in the last couple of hundred years. It’d be nice to have that on board. Concentrating on the armpit, of course… now that’s a phrase you don’t hear very often.”
“Already working on it.” Rafe nodded. “What else?”
“The galley was sterilized when she was laid up. The vat tanks’ll need new seed material. Well, the galley needs restock in general ― I've had Doug send you a list. And unless you want a mutiny on your hands you’d better include a few flats of assorted herbs for the botanist to raise.”
“The reload’s in the pipeline, too. I hadn’t thought about herbs.”
“You wouldn’t.” Moses replied, smiling what was finally a genuine smile. “You’ve never understood food, Rafe.”
“Well, yeah, probably. I mean, you’re hungry, you eat something, you process it, you go to the bathroom. Repeat as necessary. What’s the big deal?”
“You’re the reason God made Spam, Rafe. You realize that, don’t you?”
“Whatever.” He shrugged in response. “What else?”
Moses went down his list of consumables needed for the restock, finishing with “And, of course, one last, small item. Antimatter. Great, big, heaping buttloads of it.”
“I know.” Rafe shook his head. “Believe me, I know. I have fuel targeted for the ship; all we’ve got to do is distract a few prying eyes before we transship it.”
Moses nodded. “Uncle Vanya. Thanks for siccing him on me, by the way.”
“Can you think of a better distraction?”
“A fire is always a good distraction.”
“No. You cannot set Vanya on fire, Moses. It’s tacky, and it alarms the neighbors.”
“Damn.” Moses cleared the pcomp he’d been consulting. He stuck it back in his pocket and spoke as Ami came up to look down over his shoulder. She was still glaring. “Okay. Are we done, then?”
“I suppose.” He looked past Moses at Ami and continued in a conversational tone. “Out of curiosity, what underwear are you wearing today?”
Ami looked startled, then angry. She crossed her arms and looked off haughtily.
Moses looked at the screen, scratched his chin, then turned up toward Ami. He finally rose halfway out of his chair and pulled the waistband of her pants out to peer down inside. He nodded. “Ah. Right.”
Ami slowly turned to stare down at him, appalled.
Moses shrugged. “Sorry, I was curious, myself. Okay?”
“Men!” She stormed off.
Rafe spread his hands in a ‘well?’ gesture. Moses smiled and said “They’re cute… they’re quite cute, actually, and that’s all you’re going to find out. Now go away, Rafe, you bother me.” He killed the circuit.
Rafe stared at the blank vid window. Finally, he called his personal assistant, whose face appeared in the vid window in front of him.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Are you sane?”
She stared out at him for a full beat, then replied calmly. “Rumor has it that I am, yes sir. Um, why?”
“Because I badly need to speak to a sane person right now. Please join me.”
“Were you aware that I don’t get paid enough for this, sir?”
Rafe sighed. “Neither do I, Ms. Benton. Neither do I.”
☼
S’Nhu-gli stared out of the shuttle window, awed in spite of himself.
The warship was glorious.
Oh, it was primitive, he knew that. Horribly so compared to The Interloper that orbited, tiny and beautiful, beside it. But it represented the height of what his people were capable of, and S’Nhu-gli breathed a prayer of thanks to The Designer that he had been allowed to see such a thing. No, to see that his people could build such a thing.
He banked the shuttle and paid attention to his approach. The Interloper was a tiny thing, really, astonish
ingly tiny, and S’Nhu-gli was freshly amazed at the fact that it had come from another star system every time he saw it.
He carefully guided his hydrogen fueled craft in to dock at The Interloper’s single port. There was only a small amount of room on the inside ― it had apparently never been designed to transport the humaans, but there was room enough inside for a pressurized compartment for the technicians to work on it. He emerged from the airlock, lifted his visor, and took a grateful breath of air that didn’t smell like rubber or, well, him.
And that was another astonishing thing ― the fact that the life support system could support his life at all. Oh, it was not perfect. The air was far too dry and a bit too cold, and was thin enough to make breathing a task.
But the system was efficient, and tiny, and functioned in utterly incomprehensible ways to convert respired air to breathable air once more. And the fact that he could breath it at all… S’Nhu-gli looked around, freshly amazed at the universe that The Designer had created.
T’han-mri had apparently heard his shuttle docking and was waiting for him. She had been involved in reverse engineering the technology of The Interloper since she had been a cub, and probably knew more about the humaan’s technological capabilities than anyone else alive. That she was also S’Nhu-gli’s oldest child was an added bonus. He removed his helmet, pushed over in the zero gravity and embraced her fondly.
“So.” He finally said, pulling away to look her in the eyes. “What fresh astonishing thing have you discovered for me?”
T’han-mri’s nose crinkled happily. “Oh! Oh, please, come look! I’ve finally managed to translate some of those ‘historical documents’ we found. I assumed they’d be technical, but…”
“Perhaps later. I really am interested, you know. But eyes are watching us. Tell me of your progress on the driving mechanism.” He looked over at her. “That is why you called me up here, right?”
