Stealing Endeavour: Book 1 of the Forever Endeavour, Amen Trilogy

by Martin Tays

  Within seconds a harried looking MedTech representative looked out of another window. “MedTech Orbital. I’m sorry, Mister, um…” The rep looked down at his console, “… Mister Deppner, but this is really not a good time to…”

  “Shut up.” Rafe’s voice cut like a knife. “This is an orbital emergency, and if I don’t have the face of your senior manager in this window in ten seconds I’m going to come up there and hurt you very, very badly.”

  The rep gulped. “Um. Please hold.” His image was replaced by a rotating representation of the MedTech logo. Rafe turned the screen so the techs at the station could follow what was happening. Precisely eight seconds later, the logo was replaced by a large and very harried looking woman.

  Rafe nodded. “Gloria.”

  “What’s going on, Rafe? We’ve got some problems, here.”

  “You have no idea. Missing something?”

  The senior manager looked at him strangely. Rafe turned to the other vid window. “Barnhurst? Can you give me a real time video of the object?”

  “Um, sure, sir. Just a sec.” The partially suited tech entered a quick command into her console, muttered “There ya go,” and returned to her frantic suiting.

  A supplementary window opened, and the tumbling module appeared. Rafe stuck a finger into the image, dragged it over and dropped it into the other open line. “Look familiar?”

  “What the hell… crap.” Gloria nodded. “Yeah, that’s ours, Rafe. Where is it?”

  “Right now, about five minutes…”

  “Three, sir!”

  “Sorry, three. Three minutes from impacting my Traffic Control station. Any idea how this little oopsie might have happened?”

  “Jesus. None. We had a power outage. Lasted about a minute and a half. When everything came up again that…” She gestured, “… was missing. I have no idea what just happened.”

  “Huh. Well, according to my numbers…” Rafe glanced down, “… if — and it’s a very big if, Gloria — if that thing misses my station it’s going to go straight into the atmosphere and burn up.”

  All four people turned as one and looked at their respective video feeds.

  Barnhurst finally broke the silence. “Sir? The data’s firming up. I think it’s going to miss us. Not by much, but enough.”

  “Thank God.” Both Rafe and Gloria spoke at once.

  “Here it comes sir… closest approach in five… four… three… two… “ On the screen the now enormous looking pod tumbled by. In the distance, the techs heard a faint but distinct crunching noise. Barnhurst checked her console and turned to the video window, relief evident on her face. “It missed us sir. Mostly. Gonna need to go shopping for a new low band backup array, though.”

  “Better than having to break in two new techs.”

  “Amen to that, sir.”

  “You two give me a report when you get everything figured out. When are you scheduled to rotate out?”

  “Another week, sir.”

  “I’ll send your reliefs up now. Take an extra week off, on me. You two deserve it.”

  “Thank you, sir!”

  “Least I can do.” After nearly killing you, he continued silently to himself. Rafe cleared the feed from the station and turned to the other window. “So, Gloria…”

  “Rafe, I don’t know what to say.” The manager said, stricken. “I feel terrible.”

  No, I feel terrible, he thought again. Outwardly, he shrugged. “It was an accident, Gloria. We may never know what happened. No one was hurt. That pod… are you going to have problems with the client who ordered it?”

  “Well, that’s the funny thing.” Gloria finally smiled a bit. “That was an order that fell through. It’s been our white elephant for the last year and a half. Now, I guess, it’s the insurance company’s problem.” She added, darkly, “If they believe me, anyway.”

  “Tell you what. Have ‘em give me a call if they give you any problems.”

  Gloria blinked. “You’d do that, Rafe? Thanks. Really, thanks. That’d help a lot.”

  “It’s no problem. Let me know what the investigation comes up with.”

  “Will do. Thanks again, Rafe.” She smiled again. “You take care.”

  “You too.” He killed the connection with a sigh. In the last video window, the phony medical pod, its job done, was starting to glow as it began its stately plunge into the atmosphere of Haven. He sighed again and closed the last window.

  There was a discreet knocking at the door. His assistant stuck her head in, looking confused. “Sir? These, um, these came for you.”

  Rafe looked down at the objects in her hands. “Are those… are those shoes, Ms. Benton?”

  “Yes, sir.” Ms. Benton nodded. “They are most certainly shoes.”

  “Oh.” Rafe blinked. “Huh.”

  At his gesture she brought the shoes over and set them down on his desk. He looked at them quizzically, then back up to the girl. She shrugged. He shrugged back, leaned over to slip off his own shoes, then slid his feet into the new pair.

  “Huh. Again.” He took a couple of steps, bouncing up and down on his toes. “That’s, um, they’re not bad, really. Kind of nice.” He looked over at his assistant. “Cool.”

  “I’m glad you like them, sir.”

  “You are?”

  “Oh, my. Yes sir. Really glad.” She turned back to the door and whistled. It opened again and half his staff came in, all of them heavily laden with boxes. The lead people deposited them on the floor in front of his desk, looked at him strangely, and went out again.

  And came back with more. And went out, again.

  And came back with more.

  Rafe sat down, laid his head on his desk and groaned. He finally looked up at her as the parade continued and asked plaintively “Just exactly how many pairs of shoes do I now own, Ms. Benton?”

  “According to the invoice, sir…” She keyed her pcomp as she spoke. “One hundred and twenty five thousand, three hundred and fourteen.”

  He looked around at the piles, shaking his head. “One hundred…”

  “… and twenty five thousand. Yes, sir.” She nodded briskly. “And three hundred. And fourteen. Would you like for me to order socks to go with them?”

  “That… that won’t be necessary, Ms. Benton. Thank you.” He leaned back and looked over at her. “Take a letter?”

  She keyed her pcomp. “Ready, sir.”

  “To Moses Dunn, Manager, Haven Aerospace Group, Technologies Prioritization Department. Subject: Shoes. Message as follows: ‘I’m going to ram pork chops down your throat and stick a starving dog up your butt.’ Message ends.”

  “Should this go out immediately, sir?”

  “Oh, yes. Please.”

  “Will that be all?”

  “That’s quite enough. Oh, Ms. Benton?” She turned back toward him from the door. “Would you be interested in some shoes?”

  “I’m quite good in that department, sir, but thank you ever so much for asking.”

  “Worth a try.”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  Rafe looked around at the growing mounds of boxes in his now much tinier seeming office and sighed. A nearby pile toppled over, covering his desk with shoes.

  “One of these days,” He said, in a conversational tone of voice, “I’m going to have to kill that boy.”

  “I tell you… it was the most frightening helicopter trip I’d ever taken. Miles and miles of nothing. Nothing but gray.

  Nanotechnology seemed like the answer to any civilized society’s trash disposal prayers. Got junk? Make a dissassembler and cut it loose. No muss, no fuss, just a pile of elemental components, separated neatly and ready to be reused by a resource hungry world.

  Unfortunately, a programmer a
ccidentally deleted one line of programming, and the ‘bots retained the ability to reproduce themselves. And the result was the destruction of the fifth largest metropolitan complex in North America, and the deaths of over six million people.

  “All for one line of code.”

  Armin Langsley Hughes, from “The Day We Lost Detroit”

  “After the Detroit incident we came that close to banning nanotechnology altogether. I mean, President Davis had the bill on his desk, ready to be signed, when doctors informed him that his daughter had been diagnosed with a particularly malignant melanoma ― one that had metastasized and spread throughout her system.

  Horribly ironic, don’t you think? That the only thing that’d save her was an experimental protocol ― targeted cellbuster nanites piggybacked onto a T-10 ‘phage. Tech that was explicitly outlawed by the bill he had backed with all his political might.

  He vetoed the bill.

  It destroyed him politically, naturally. Speaker of the House Else Fitzsimmons famously stated that afterward he ‘couldn’t get elected Mayor of Detroit’, but he didn’t give a damn.

  That was nearly three hundred years ago. I still don’t think we’ve ever seen a better example of a hero.”

  Eautus K. Fu, from Tiny Tech: A Nanohistory

  “I don’t think anyone not alive at the time can begin to comprehend how horrified we all were that he’d vetoed that bill. I mean, in one week the Secret Service investigated four and a half million death threats on the President. One of ‘em was from the Vice President, for Christ’s sake.

  Yet historians look back on it now and say that there’s no possible way society ― hell, mankind ― could have survived without nanotech. He saved the world, is what he did.

  It’s a funny damn universe.”

  Thaddeus Griffin, from “The Ultimate Paradigm”

  Chapter 15

  “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

  Les Brown

  “Sweet Maker’s breath.”

  S’Nhu-gli stared at the video feed from the exterior of the warship in awe. The asteroid was gone. Not holed, but pulverized. It had been utterly destroyed. Deep inside the warship, the railgun powered down.

  “Impressive, no?” General K’har-atah said from his command station. The weapon’s test had been satisfactory. Quite satisfactory. “And I have you to thank for it, priest.”

  S’Nhu-gli shrugged, uncomfortable with the praise. Or, to be more accurate, uncomfortable with the cause for it. “It was merely a logical application, General, of recent advances in magnetics. Are you sure, sir, that this is necessary?”

  K’har-atah looked over at him. “Are you sure, sir, that it is not?”

  He dipped his head to his chest in negation. “No. No, I’m not. We must be prepared to defend ourselves. It’s just so…” He looked back up at the General, pausing for a moment before continuing. “Do you believe in The Architect, General?”

  “What kind of question is that?” The General replied angrily. “Of course I do.”

  “So all things unfold according to His plan, right?”

  The General nodded. “That would follow in turn, yes. Why? Why do you ask?”

  The small engineer hesitated, then turned back toward the viewport. He finally spoke. “Why would The Architect make such wondrous beings as these humaans, then turn them against us?”

  K’har-atah looked off into the distance, considering. Finally, he began speaking. “’And H’arn-nehk spoke, saying ‘My Lord, and why do my enemies, fruit of thy loin, seek my undoing? Are they not your children, also?’ And The Architect spoke unto H’arn-nehk, saying ‘My child… when your son left your household, did he not become a carpenter, as you forbade?’”

  The General was staring at the priest as he spoke. S’Nhu-gli completed the quote in a quiet tone of voice. “’And The Maker said ‘Even had you the power to force him to follow in your footsteps, you would have allowed him thus. For he was his own, and no one else’s.’ Indeed, General. And may I say I’m impressed. You’ve studied the scriptures, I see.”

  “My household was a very… strict one, priest. I knew The Design Of The Architect before I could stand, really.”

  “So from one strict household to another, General. I think I understand you a bit more.” The priest pushed away from the viewport and came over to the command station. “And your point is very well taken. Still…” He hesitated. “Still, I cannot but hope that these creatures… these creatures are…”

  “Children as we?”

  “Yes. Children as we.”

  The General unfastened his safety belt and pushed himself off from the command chair. “You’ll probably be surprised by this, priest, but I hope that too.”

  He turned, surprised, and looked at the General. “Really?”

  “Yes. Really. I understand that this may come as a shock to you, but we in the military do not like war.” He turned back to the priest. “Fighting an enemy intent on destroying you is the second worst thing you can possibly do.”

  S’Nhu-gli looked at him questioningly. “Not fighting an enemy intent on destroying you?”

  “That’s the first. I’m impressed in turn, priest.”

  He looked the General in the eye. “I am loyal to my Emperor, sir, and more importantly to my people and to their Designer. I understand the fact that the final arbiter sometimes is ― must be ― the sword. That doesn’t mean I find it pleasurable.”

  “Only a fool or the insane finds killing pleasurable, priest.” K’har-atah floated, staring at the place where an asteroid had recently been. “But, on the other hand, only a fool or the insane shirks from doing so to protect his own.”

  “Indeed, General. I find myself strangely comforted. If it must come to war with these humaans, I am relieved that it will be you conducting it.”

  The General was oddly moved. “Thank you. We live in troubled times, priest. ‘May the Maker watch over us in our time of need.’”

  “’And comfort us in our hour of want.’ Yes.” S’Nhu-gli looked back at the screen, back toward where the devastated rock had been orbiting. “May he comfort us all.”

  ☼

  “Jesus and biscuits, Cath!” Sandar’s voice was tight and sharp over the radio. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” Cath looked at the idiot pad on her sleeve suspiciously, but the pressure in her suit seemed to be holding. “No pressure loss, anyway. Jesus and what?”

  “Biscuits.” Sandar verified that the final connector had gone home, then hurriedly pushed herself over to the pressure suited engineer. “It’s something my mom… one of my moms… used to say.”

  “Weird.”

  “Yeah.” She came to a halt by Cath and grabbed her arm, inspecting it thoroughly. “You were lucky.”

  “Tell me about it. Are we secure?”

  “What? Yeah, sure, we’re fine.” Sandar waved at the drive above them, then turned back toward the engineer. Concern came through in her voice. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Damn it, I said I’m fine. I’m fine.” Cath replied gruffly, then continued in a softer tone of voice. “Thanks, though.”

  Sandar blushed inside her helmet. “Next time I yell move, can you do me a favor?”

  “Move?”

  “That would be the one, yeah.” She reached out and grabbed Cath’s pressure suited arm. Cath reached over with her other hand and patted Sandar’s hand awkwardly.

  They were on the outside of the engineering section of the Endeavour. The new drive module was now attached securely to the ship, and the two suited figures turned as one to start making their way back toward the lock.

  After cycling through, they moved into the engineering module. In the suiting compartment, Cath immediately
began shucking off her suit. Sandar hesitated, uncomfortable.

  Cath, down to a brief pair of panties, looked up at Sandar. She looked back down at herself, then back up to her companion. Finally, something clicked. “Oh. You’re not… I’m sorry, does this bother you?”

  “No. No, no, no, no. Yes. I don’t know.” Sandar had been trying to avoid overtly staring, but curiosity got the better of her. She finally looked over toward the mostly nude engineer. “Oh. My.”

  “Well, aren’t you the sweet one?” Cath smiled, though she was blushing a bit, herself. She jutted her breasts out, which jiggled obligingly in the weightless environment. “Always thought they were my best assets, myself.”

  Sandar looked up and caught the engineer’s eyes. “They’re not.” She paused, then waved her hands frantically. “Wait, no, damn it… I mean… I mean they’re nice, don’t get me wrong. They’re very nice. But your best asset is… your best asset is you.”

  “Damn.” Cath looked over at Sandar. “That was pretty much exactly the right thing to say.”

  “Imagine the odds.” Sandar hesitated, then began awkwardly peeling out of her suit. After a few moments, she pushed the last of it away and floated, naked herself, toward the engineer. Cath grabbed her and held her at arm’s length, regarding her.

  Sandar looked down at her small breasts and blushed. “I’m not much to look at. I know. Long, thin drink of water.”

  “Bullshit.” Cath shook her head, looking Sandar in the eye. “Moses would do you in a heartbeat, you know.”

  “You think?”

  “I know.”

  “Ew.”

  “Sorry.” Cath smiled, then looked into her eyes. There was a long, timeless moment, then they melted together.