by Jim Rudnick
She keyed her book once more and went back to the saved spot where the Musketeers were about to be ambushed by the Cardinals men—she would have to look up the author to see what else he might have as this was just good literature. She closed her eyes and imagined the alleys and cafes in this city from two thousand years ago. She loved that the author sometimes spent pages telling about the Musketeers and their loves and lives, and how they were so loyal to their King.
King, she said to herself. The Caliph was like a King—the head of his own empire of what eight or nine planets. Inherited it from his father and now ran the Caliphate with it’s billions of citizens like it was his own.
And it was his own.
She was going down that road, she knew that she did sometimes that reminded her that she’d not taken the chance, the opportunity to force him to marry her. She could have been the Queen…that always brought a grin and this time was no different.
She shook her head. Shake out that shit, that dreck, that feces—she knew that she knew more than a dozen words for the dung that often clogged up her brain. Knowing the various words didn’t help though, as she still knew that she had missed a chance.
On Neres, she walked down the landing ramp as the Whitney came right down to the naval base.
She got a robo-cab and took it over to the University and took a sliding walkway that wound it’s way to and fro among the various buildings till she got to her own and got off, took the stairs two at a time and entered her ante-room and smiled at the only occupant there.
The Caliph Sharia al Dotsa, stood and walked over to her, but she held up a hand to stop him
She went to her PDA and made a small change to her security levels, then grabbed him by the hand and pulled him into her own private office. She was eager and she made no bones about it as she turned and dragged Sharia’s top off his frame and pushed him down onto her big comfy couch. She bent to yank off his soft brown boots too and then knelt between his legs to slowly work down his leggings. Moments later she too was naked and they made love.
Twice.
Then they rested and she was oh so glad that she’d thought ahead to get her assistant to take some vacation days and she smiled as she cuddled in his arm, his black hair thick and curly on his forearm. He had a leg curled over her hip and it too, she could see had the same thick black curly hair too. His feet she saw, were big but not overly large and his toenails were so nice that he must have a pedicure often. His one hand was cupping a breast—her left breast and he squeezed it every so often.
She nodded off for about a half-hour and then she slid sideways on the couch and put on her panties and bra and finished getting dressed.
Sharia joined her and in a few minutes they were seated over at her round meeting table.
She nodded and said “hope you don’t mind—business is usually first, I know—but today I just had to have you,” she said and she grinned at him.
He grinned back and then looked away for a moment and then back at her.
“The Ghayth wreck? Anything new?” and business was back on their current conversation.
She nodded.
“Yeah, I’ve really not much more—you got the part I sent what a few weeks ago with the security on the bridge door. We found that every single thing that we ‘launch’ at the door, which would be construed as being an attack on the door, disappears. We found out where these things go—bullets, arrows, even a coin tossed at speed. They all go to the northern wharehouse area, into a separate room and into a separate box too. We know that the transport of the projectile takes less than a millisecond to travel the eight thousand miles from the wreck to the arctic wharehouse area at that speed. That’s where we are on the bridge door area.
He nodded.
“Instantaneous transport—in milliseconds over eight thousand miles. That’s a technology I’d like to have….stay on that one Cheryl” he said and he smiled at her.
“If you’ve the time, I didn’t put my boots back on, so…” he said as an offer that appealed to her as she rose and took off her dress once again.
He lifted her up and dropped her on the table and made love to her in a rush…
She moaned. She wanted to be Queen…but that was for another day…today it was good enough to be his woman…
#####
Tanner turned onto his old street in Astillon, Read Drive and walked slowly down the street, towards his old home. He’d parked his flyer on the side street just beside his block and as he began to walk, he thought back. As he did, he mentally tried to remember who lived where—and where his childhood friends had gone.
Billy Ryder lived there, he said to himself, as he passed #4337 and been in every room of that house as a kid and Billy was a great friend back then. He could still see the boy’s bright yellow blond hair and his freckles too. They’d played soccer together for quite a few years till about high school when Billy’s family moved away. Tanner had always thought that his dad had gotten a new job and the family could now afford a new bigger house.
He shook his head as he remembered that his mom was a single mom, no big paycheck from a husband but that hadn’t stopped her from doing her two jobs and at least putting a roof over him and his sisters heads and food on the table.
He slowed as he walked…the thought of sisters still hurt…plural. Two sisters….now he had none.
There was the O’Grady’s house, the old man who lived there hated that he and Billy cut across his front lawn all the time, and jumped the hedge—sometimes not so well either. He would come out on his porch and sit there when middle school let out so that he could yell at them before they even took the short cut across his lawn.
Tanner shook his head—now, I’d have to agree with him…we should have walked the extra few steps and not bothered our neighbor. Kids, he said to himself, were just kids…
He walked on, reminding himself of the other neighbors, the Smiths were there, across the street were the two brothers, the Clancys and as he went through his list, he realized that as far as he knew now, these neighbors were most likely gone. No more O’Gradys or Clancys…all had most likely moved up in class as they matured and their kids grew and they did better in the job marketplace. Now, new families had most likely populated the street with new young families and as he walked and looked down driveways and in open garages, yes he saw kids toys and the like.
He smiled. Read Drive was yes, in a part of Astillon that one would have to consider as an entry point to housing—you bought here to gain a foothold in the housing market—and as you moved up in the job market, you sold here and went over say to the Westdale community about twenty blocks away. Or the Roselawn community up near the mountain that ran just south of the city. Doing superbly might mean you could move up on one of the terraced communities on the mountain itself, where homes were triple the size of his old one coming up on his right. He was home.
Number 4278 Read Drive.
It is where I lived for the first nineteen or so years of my life, he said to himself as he turned to face the small bungalow that sat in the middle of the lot.
Lawn needed a mow, he said to himself, and that roof probably a new set of shingles too. Driveway is empty, so either the new owner was at work or maybe didn’t even have a car. The windows all had drapes that he could see, so that was a good thing. Paint the frames though would be a job that should be done soon and the steps up to the front door needed the bricks to be re-pointed.
He smiled. I’ve got jobs that need to be done and I’m not the owner—or buyer either.
He stood and looked at his old house and smiled. The tree that was in the small space between his house and the one next door that held the Clinton family, had grown and grown well. Some kind of native tree—he’d forgotten it’s species name, but the broad leaves were as big as dinner plates and the boughs were that sort of olive greenish/brownish color that he’d forgotten too.
He walked to the edge of the driveway and peered down to see if he could see the
backyard, and it was again a lawn without a kids playground or sandbox like he used to have. Nineteen years in that house and how many hundreds or thousands of days did he spend playing in that backyard—
“Say, what you doing, mister?” a voice called out from behind him.
It was O’Grady, Tanner knew as soon as he heard the voice and he turned slowly to see the man.
Old. Older than he remembered, but then twenty-two years could do that. Wearing a simple black golf shirt over shorts that showed off the mans too thin and white legs. Socks in sandals too, Tanner saw and he smiled at the man.
“Mr. O’Grady, right?” he said as he moved off the edge of the driveway and stood before the man who was on the sidewalk.
“Do I know you, lad?” the man said, his eyes squinting with effort.
“You might remember me, I’m Tanner Scott—I used to live right here back twenty some odd years ago…”
O’Grady tilted his head back a bit and looked up…probably into his memory, Tanner thought…
“Yeah, you and that Billy kid—you two ruined my lawn,” he said as he pointed down the street.
“What you want now?” he said and Tanner just smiled back at the man.
“Sorry about your lawn, we were just kids, Mr. O’Grady. I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d like to see my old house, so I came by. Nice to see it still here and it looks like a new roof and coat of paint would be all she needs,” he said.
The old man harrumphed.
“That and the driveway needs a new paving and the backyard is so infected with dandelions, it’s weeding up the whole street. No boys though—the family there has but one daughter. She never runs on my lawn, either, young man,” he finished off and began to turn away to continue his way towards his face.
He stopped.
He turned back and faced Tanner once more.
“Sorry young man—just remembered about the Looper accident—my apologies to you and yours…terrible thing it was…” he said and he turned and walked away.
Tanner stood rock still.
He breathed deeply and realized that on his hip, he was drumming the one-two-two, one-two-two rhythm of his anti-PTSD syndrome. He breathed slowly and deeply and the PTSD attack was slowly dispelled from his unconscious state and his left hand no longer beat the pattern that counteracted the attacks.
He breathed shallower now and then grimaced to himself.
Accident. It had been an accident. Everyone knew that—except his Mother and Gia.
He had lost his sister Nora who had died on the Looper ship.
He had lived.
And he’d been disowned by his remaining family.
The accidental crash of the looper ship had not been his fault—but when he stepped in to help, he’d had to park his sister in her seat and he’d done his best to save the ship and all it’s passengers. But he’d not been able to avoid the next flush of meteors that came up behind the ship, and one had looked like it’d impact on the starboard side of the ship. As the pilot, he’d held true to the course, pushing the throttle to max trying to outrun the meteor and avoid turning to port as that was directly into the red hot sunlight.
He’d held true to his course.
The meteor had slammed into the side of the looper ship, smashing in almost five feet before the force field came on to keep the hull breach intact. It had killed the three passengers in the window seats on the starboard side.
One of the passengers was Nora, his sister.
He had killed his own sister—inadvertently by following the best path that the looper ship AI crafted for the ship after the surprise first meteor hit.
He was the pilot. He brought home after this meteor shower more than fifty saved passengers.
Only three had died.
The fact that one had been his own sister meant that he was a hero to media from all over the Earldom of Kinross.
The fact that he felt instead like a villain was his own penance.
Till he got home after all the debriefings and post-mortem reports and media and communication vid casts.
He lost a sister.
He got to his front door—that door right there, he said to himself.
His mother had opened the door and had reached out and slapped him across the face as hard as any woman slapped her son.
She screamed at him about his inability to protect his sister—she was almost ten years younger than him. She had gone for a ride on the looper as her brother was the newest looper pilot to have earned his wings. He promised to watch her, his mother had been told. He promised that no harm would come to her.
And the vids said that he did have a choice—and he chose to save others and not her side of the looper ship.
She called him a coward. She called him a murderer. She called him no son of hers and she slammed the door in his face.
She yelled from behind the door for him to get off her property and never ever come back….that he was dead to her.
He stood now today in the sunshine and looked at that door and felt like any son would, he thought, when faced with what happened.
He had thought then, that she was right, that he should have disregarded the course the looper AI setup and tried harder.
Then, that he was a coward, knowing that taking action against the AI would have risked the whole ship and his own life.
Then, that as it was all of his ninth trip as the looper pilot, that he was too new to the job to be capable.
Capable in case there was an accident, of what to do in case a rogue meteor shower caught the looper, like it sometimes did every once in a dozen years.
But now, today, he knew that she was wrong.
He’d weighed his actions on the helm of the looper ship a million times.
AI was right. Maintain straight and true, floor the ship and stay away from the shower as it surrounded the ship itself.
He’d have never known that from his experience, nor for that matter from his training.
He looked again at the front door, then he turned to retrace his steps down the street and towards his flyer.
As he got to the closest edge of the O’Grady house, he zig-zagged up and over the man’s lawn, making sure to stomp all across it and at the hedge he just pushed through and then went back out to the sidewalk.
He didn’t bother to turn and answer the “hey there you hooligan…” coming from the old man who now was out on his front porch shaking a fist at him. He ignored the shouts all the way back to his flyer and popped her up and back towards the landing base…
#####
Deep inside the RIM Confederacy Administration building were the normal offices and support staff of almost a thousand souls, all working every day to keep the more than forty realms a part of the larger whole. Various departments looked after various tasks, like Customs and Health and Labor and Education and the Navy too. Each had it’s own appointed Department heads and deputies in charge of smaller breakdowns of their mandated tasks.
And behind them of course was the IT people who worked on getting all of these various departments to be able to work, to talk to each other, to communicate both locally and across the whole of the RIM Confederacy via their Ansible networks too. Millions of petabytes of data were handled on a daily basis, both live as well as archived and stored in the master RIM database.
Earlier at the end of last week, a flag had been raised on a notification warning about a newcomer to the RIM.
The notification was instituted more than seven years ago, by Admiral McQueen, when he’d first been appointed as the head of the RIM Navy. He had made it about as easy as possible and had forgotten he’d even done so, but when the flag came up on his console in his office in Navy Hall…he stopped everything else.
He’d gotten a notice.
The notice was from the RIM database that a certain name had just been archived as a new visitor to the RIM Confederacy.
This person had come from inwards, on the Majestic, a cruise and sleeper ship
combined.
It appeared that she’d come from almost thirteen hundred lights away—from the Earldom of Kinross.
It also appeared that she’d been admitted with no qualifications at all—Customs noted that she was a Gallipedia employee as well.
She had been admitted one week ago.
Gia Scott was on the RIM.
He frowned.
Maybe this was not something to worry about.
And then maybe it was.
He leaned back and half turned to his right to look out the windows at the end of summer weather on Juno.
Bright sun, but he had dark thoughts.
What to do.
He smiled at that and remembered what he had taught thousands of Academy cadets, followed by captains in many navies, that re-con is the most important thing to him now.
He needed to know more.
He needed to find someone who he could enlist with the order to find Gia, and look into what she was doing here on the RIM.
And of course, if there was any connection—current connection he meant, between her and her brother Tanner.
Who, though he thought….who could he find for this…
He thought and the person who came to mind first, would work the best…
He grinned and clicked his console to speak to his secretary.
“Nancy, find me where the Atlas is, and then get this message to them? I want lieutenant Sander in my office first thing tomorrow morning. Any means possible and make this a special RIM Navy request so the Baroness who will eventually hear about it will be okay with same. STAT, Nancy, you got that?” he asked and hung up before he even heard the answer.
Okay, he had a great candidate, now all he had to do is to tell him enough to do the job, but not enough to worry him…
#####
Beedles liked being the only member of the Xeno team that specialized in artifacts. The fact that he was the expert, meant that each and every single item found on the wreck came to his attention. He got the tablet notice and the vids that accompanied same and that gave him an overall edge when one thing that was found meant that a previous discovery all of a sudden made sense.
