by K S Augustin
He was working his way towards the far wall when he finally found it. His hand stilled for a moment then, in a rush, he was diving under the basin, peering up at the small section of underpanel that had something scratched on it. But—dammit to hell!—he couldn’t see anything. The overhead illumination, housed well above head height, couldn’t brighten the area near the floor and a nervous search of his cabin confirmed that there were no portable sources of light.
He stalked back to the bathroom and lay on the floor. If he had scratched that message, he must have known it was a place that would remain in mysterious darkness. So, assuming it was him who had made those scratches, it would be coded against unfriendly discovery, yet in a way that was easy to decipher or, better yet, appear innocent. Slowly, with his eyes closed again, Srin let the tip of his index finger trace the angular scratches. It was text. He mouthed out the letters as he completed each one.
R-E-V-A-I-I.
That was all. Just six letters. Srin traced the letters again, then skimmed the rest of the panel. There was nothing else.
With a groan, he got to his feet. Surely it hadn’t been that difficult before to get up? He walked back to his bed, stretching his back as he did so.
Revaii.
A name? A place? And was it standard Ingel or some other language?
“Revaii.” He said it out loud, hoping the sound of it in his ears would spark inspiration. “Revaii. Revaii. Rev…Re…Rrr… Shit!” His expletive was soft but heartfelt. “Reva….”
He stopped and his head jerked up. “Reva. Reva II.”
Reva II.
That was one name he knew. It was where he had been planning to take Yalona for a holiday. He remembered a funding proposal he had before the Science Directorate. Last month. Or fifteen years ago. He was so confident of the outcome and was determined to take Yalona away on a much-deserved holiday once it had been approved. To Reva II.
It wasn’t the flashiest of tourist destinations but, then, neither was it the most expensive. But with its lesser crowds, beautiful weather and greater affordability, it was the perfect choice for a young researcher on the up-and-up and his beautiful soon-to-be-bonded partner.
But why would he have scratched a holiday destination into the panel under the bathroom sink? Was that where Yalona was? Without any other concrete evidence, Srin couldn’t accept that as fact. If he knew Yalona was there, he would have added some other identifying information. Even a scribbled “Y” would have been enough. But there was nothing. No, “Reva II” must mean something else.
He thought about the attractions of the planet. There were mountains to hike up and slide down, beaches to walk and dive from. And fantastic surfing waves formed by the influence of Reva’s other claim to fame, its terraformed moon. It was the only such satellite in Republic space.
Terraformed moon. Moon.
Dr. Moon Thadin.
His eyes narrowed.
He hadn’t thought about the good doctor for the past hour, but that was more through accident than design. She was one of the few people he could picture clearly in his mind’s eye. They were almost of the same height, which he liked. Her features exuded warmth. Her skin was soft and soothing, her eyes dark and embracing, and her hair—scraped back in the no-nonsense bun she seemed to like—was night-black and shiny. It was only the expression on her face that chilled, turning generous lips into a censorious line, and the chocolate-brown of her eyes into hard stone.
Yet, he could see that there was something bubbling under that cold surface, something in Dr. Thadin that made her worth remembering, worth pursuing. He tried putting his physical awareness of her to one side, but it was difficult. Her figure was broader-hipped than Yalona’s, but the unconscious sway of her body as she walked beckoned to him. He hadn’t felt like this since—since Yalona. And felt a pang of betrayal even as he recollected the stellar physicist’s sultry features. Using his rising guilt as a lever, he steered his mind to more rational avenues.
Rather than concentrating on her physical attributes, or the hint of fire hidden in her eyes, Srin tried to analyse the physicist in a more dispassionate fashion. Finally, he nodded. Yes, he could see why he might identify Moon Thadin as the weak link. No matter how she tried to hide it, he knew there was vulnerability behind the otherwise impervious slate of her gaze. And he wasn’t so blind that he hadn’t noticed the guarded fear on her face whenever she looked at Hen Savic. She kept the expression well camouflaged when talking with his therapist/minder, but couldn’t suppress her distaste when his back was turned. Interestingly enough, her look at Hen was invariably followed by a quick furtive dart over to him, wherever he happened to be in the lab.
Yes, Dr. Thadin definitely knew more than mere stellar-forming. She knew something about him that even he didn’t know about himself. Just that one thought was enough to make Srin angry, feeding the violation he felt at being the ignorant pawn in a game he couldn’t begin to comprehend.
But Moon Thadin comprehended it. And he was determined to get an answer to the puzzle of his life. If only he could remember how to do it.
“How’s the research going?”
Moon smiled and sipped at her drink. Since her altercation with Savic, her dinners with the captain of the Differential had become a semi-regular event. She knew it was a way of running from a problem, but she couldn’t help herself. Drue’s conversation didn’t send her thoughts into tumult the way Savic’s barbed comments did. And unlike the grey depths of Srin’s intense gaze, the captain’s looks were appreciative. But Moon thought they appeared that way because he thought that was how he was meant to behave, rather than because there was any depth of feeling behind them. In a way, the time she spent with Drue was a lot like the time she spent with Kad. Both were attractive men, but there were other things on their mind than her. For Kad, it was research. For Drue, it was her experiment. She was almost at the periphery of their focus, and happy to remain so.
“Things seem to be going well,” she said, after a breath.
The remains of their meal was scattered on the table before them. They often used the snatches of silence while eating to briefly catch up on news. Moon was too busy in her lab to link in with the normal nets, and her dinner partner seemed to enjoy relating the latest items to her, and adding his comments. He was, she found out, a perceptive observer of life in the Republic.
His eyebrows rose. “Just, ‘well?’”
She grinned at his deadpan comment. “What do you want me to say, Drue?” They had moved from “Doctor” and “Captain” to “Moon” and “Drue” two dinners ago. The old Moon may have clung to her reserve and still kept the relationship formal, despite Drue’s invitation to use his given name. But the new Moon was a woman who realised that her studied ignorance of the people who surrounded her had indirectly led to three years of incarceration. She was determined not to be so aloof. Getting to know people better, to accept them at a more intimate level, was the first step towards this, although she wondered if she would ever take the second and actually start trusting again.
“That success is assured, would be a good start.”
“All right.” She tilted her head at him. “Success is assured.”
“You’re just saying that.”
His words were light but even Moon could see to his underlying tension. Her expression sobered.
“If it wasn’t for Srin’s help, I couldn’t have got as far along in my work. I would have needed another month at least, just to get to this point.”
“Is he that good?” Was there a thread of jealousy in his voice? No, she must be mistaken. Or maybe it was professional jealousy, from one competent man to another, both of them superbly equipped for their work. Except one of those men was also mentally crippled.
“Yes, he’s that good.” She hesitated. “You know what they’ve done to him, don’t you?”
It was the first time she broached the subject of Srin’s drugging with the Differential’s captain, and she was a little afraid that he
would be offended by her remark and stop their dinners. So she had held her tongue, but felt she couldn’t do so any longer.
Drue looked at her evenly. “Don’t you mean what we’ve done to him?”
“We?” She frowned. How could he accuse her of complicity in such a crime when she hadn’t even met Srin before? Hadn’t even imagined that someone like him existed?
“You’re part of the Republic, aren’t you, Moon?”
“Yes, but—”
“And, with the exception of your detention, weren’t you a happy member of the Republic?”
“Yes. I suppose.”
“Did you ever wonder about people like Srin? Or the shapeshifters we seem so bent on eradicating? Or the humans we leave on Bliss?”
“I….” She paused. Of course she had been deathly afraid that the Republic might send her to the notorious prison planet—a place full of hardened criminals and shapeshifters. The one place in the galaxy that no living being ever left. But she hadn’t thought beyond that, to what a lifelong incarceration on Bliss meant to its inhabitants. Or why a Space Fleet captain, of all people, should care? She searched his features but saw nothing beyond polite enquiry. If Drue Jeen had any skeletons in his closet, they weren’t about to make an appearance at this meal.
“As a scientist, I subscribe to a number of nets,” she began, conversationally. “Even when I was finally moved to the halfway house, I used to use whatever spare time I was given to catch up on what was happening in the science world, and what projects the Directorate was funding. And, every year, I’d get surprised. Not by the projects, but the breakthroughs. It would seem that an avenue of research was stagnant, and then it would suddenly get going again. The way mine has after Srin started working with me.”
“You hadn’t heard about him before this?”
She shook her head. “No, not a clue.” She paused. “I suppose what I’m trying to say, Drue, is that I understand what you’re trying to say, but we don’t have very much free will in any of this. Let’s take Srin as an example. I hate what’s being done to him, but what are the alternatives? Stop working? That hurts you as well as me.”
Moon didn’t need to see the grimace on Drue’s face to know that he had been following similar lines of thought.
“If neither of us has an answer, Moon,” he asked, “why mention Turk in the first place?”
Now that was a good question. There were certainly smarter things to discuss than a man who had been drugged for two decades and the minder who dogged his steps.
“Maybe it’s because I needed to know that it’s not bad to feel revulsion for what’s been done to him.” It hadn’t always been so, but the past year in particular had not been a comfortable time for her. She felt unbalanced, out of phase, as if she was seeing things through a different lens than the rest of the galaxy. As if everyone else could see some logic to actions that she considered distasteful. “Hen Savic seems to have things all sorted out in his mind.”
“Hen Savic has had twenty years to get used to the idea,” Drue countered soberly. He took a swallow of his wine. “You realise that our current topic of discussion could be considered grounds for treason?”
“Discussing Savic and Srin, you mean?”
“Savic. Bliss. Shapeshifters. Sympathy.” He shrugged.
Moon looked around the captain’s cosy dining room. “Does that mean we stand trial tomorrow?” She felt tired rather than alarmed. “I can’t say I’m surprised. I always thought these ships were extensively monitored.”
“Do you think there are hidden video and audio devices on the ship?”
She nodded.
“No need,” he told her with a tight smile. “We all police each other. A little over one hundred people on board an airtight vessel, each watching what the other one does. Who needs electronics?”
The wine in Moon’s glass was gone, but she drank from her water tumbler gratefully, using the time to give herself courage to ask the next, inevitable, question.
“Drue…” She paused. “You don’t seem the type.”
“The type for what?”
She waved a hand, taking in the room and everything beyond it. “This. The ship. I never thought Space Fleet captains were so philosophical.” She pinned a slight smile on her face. “What is someone like you doing here? It doesn’t look like you approve of much of what the Republic is doing, yet you’re in their Space Fleet, captain of one of the largest ships in the galaxy. Doesn’t that seem a little, strange, to you?”
“Where would I go?” he answered. “Beyond the Republic is a mass of warring factions whose size of territory differs with each war won and lost. They all have different languages, different technologies, different physiologies. At least within the Republic, I know I’ll mostly be amongst humans. We hold the balance of power in this part of the galaxy.”
His words were at odds with the thoughtful man she had shared many a meal with.
“And is that so important to you?”
“Yes,” he answered simply. “I may not like a lot of what the Republic does, but I like being a starship captain. It’s what I always wanted to be, ever since I was a child. Besides, after such specialised training, what else could I do?”
“So we’re all doomed.” There was a trace of a question in her statement.
He shrugged, unmoved. “Some more than others, certainly. I don’t know that there’s any hope for your friend, the Turk. As for you and I, well, if this experiment of yours succeeds, there’ll be enough glory to spread around. For you, I’m sure the Republic has the kinds of rewards appropriate for an eminent scientist. And, for me, a promotion. Maybe even a new ship.”
There was something else there, in the back of his eyes, but Moon was caught by another thought.
“For Hen Savic.” She added, “If I succeed, he gets even more pride and a continued sense of justification.” She didn’t like that idea, that someone like Savic would not only follow in the wake of her own reputation, but thrive by exploiting the abilities of a man he himself had crippled.
“There’s nothing we can do about that, Moon.”
The tragedy of it all was that Drue was right.
Chapter Six
It was almost two weeks since Moon’s altercation with Savic, and the ship was locked down. The Differential had left the rendezvous system nine days ago and was already on its way to the Suzuki Mass. The Mass contained a dead star that just might live again, if her theories were correct. After double-checking the ship’s integrity and confirming supplies and orders for the journey ahead, the ship arced out of its outer orbit and then, with one last sigh, shot itself into another dimension.
With that last action, Moon felt well and truly alone. Besides her lab, there were few places on the Differential where she felt at peace. The canteens were either barren and lonely, or full and loud. She could, by now, not only state the number of panels in her quarters, but also identify the position of each by their subtle differences. The corridors were wide but often populated with grim-faced men that Moon had no desire to brush past, much less enter into conversation with.
The only other refuge she had—the small observation room she’d stumbled upon after that fateful meeting with Srin’s keeper—was denied to her, its transparent viewports shuttered. An identical thick metal plate also sealed the single port in her lab. More than the medium-security facility where she had been held, Moon felt like she was in a smooth, impermeable cage, unable to draw a clean breath or even envisage a way out. The only way she could keep her mind from baulking at the confinement, to keep herself distracted, was to spend most of her spare time working.
But there were moments of introspection she could not avoid. Like now, late afternoon ship time, when she had called a rare but well-deserved day off and Srin was away doing whatever he did in his spare time when he wasn’t helping her or flirting with her.
After her altercation with Savic, and her own cowardly musings, Moon made it a point to avoid any personal conversation
s with Srin, but the consequence of her decision was more painful than she could have imagined. Every two days he would greet her with friendly curiosity that soon segued into charming banter and, nine times out of ten, an invitation to dinner. Moon’s initial response was to get increasingly brusque with each rejection, until she realised that he had no idea he had already played this particular game several times over. It wasn’t his fault, yet she was punishing him for it. It made her feel terrible. The sooner she was through with her mission and divorced of him and his disturbing proximity, the better.
At the same time she dreaded the ship’s approach to the Suzuki Mass. What if she was wrong? What if all her research came to nothing? What if there was some basic flaw in her reasoning that she couldn’t see? Would the Republic accuse her of sabotage?
On the other hand, what if she was successful beyond her wildest imaginings? What if she could prove that she held the science to life, the secret to unlock and lay bare the field of stellar mechanics? That, too, held its own small terrors. She had fantasies of becoming the darling of the Science Directorate, of having teams of researchers working under her supervision. But during the meals she had with Drue, he had somehow intimated that success had its own problems, and that tempered her own enthusiasm.
He had also hinted at the potential for misuse of such a powerful technology. But he never actually discussed it. Still, his subtle remarks were enough to kick start Moon’s already hair-trigger paranoia, amplified by the otherwise crushing schedule she kept.
Surely the Republic saw that the benefits of successful stellar re-ignition greatly outweighed any other application? The Republic could be known throughout the galaxy as a midwife to life, rather than a harbinger of death. It could talk firmly about its more noble goals, rather than have its critics mutter darkly behind its back about shapeshifters, genocide and the hellhole planet of Bliss.
But her reasoning was not as comforting as she expected. Moon got to her feet abruptly, tamping down a feeling of claustrophobia and walking over to the display panel on the wall of her cabin. With impatient fingers, she toggled through the usual variety of images, but none of them included a real-time view of what was outside. That was because they were now traversing hyperspace, that nebulous dimension outside normal space that folded distance and cut travel time into a fraction of what it would have been in normal space. Looking directly upon the chaotic nonsense of hyperspace had been known to send humans into madness.
