Back in the bedroom, Aline tried to arouse me, but nothing was happening in that direction. Going into the Death system had me totally consumed, and not even naked girls could disengage my worry. I only had to make one mistake, and we were all dead. As a mood disrupter, it was pretty effective.
Aline gave up, turned over, and went back to sleep.
I lay there.
I was sitting in my command chair, in space.
Hundreds of people stood behind me, beginning with the twins, each line containing two extra people to form a huge triangle.
No ship, no life support, no nothing.
Just me, in my chair, in space. With a triangle of people behind me.
Space around me was vaguely familiar.
As I looked around I saw no planets.
There were many asteroid fields.
In the distance, two gas giants.
A movement in front of me caught my eye.
A black dot had appeared at long range.
As I watched, another dot appeared.
Then another.
Then ten, a hundred, a thousand.
Space in front of me turned black.
I bolted upright again, and kept going right off the bed. I lay there for a while, before finally Aline appeared above me.
"Whatcha doing?" The twins rushed in again. "Oh."
"Time Jane?"
"The little hand is on the five, and the big hand is on the twelve."
"In adult please?"
"Five."
"Thanks."
The twins hauled me up, and flopped me back on the bed.
"Jon," said Aline. "Have you ever thought of not going to sleep?"
"I wish."
"We wish!"
"Not biologically possible," added Jane.
"What was it this time?" asked Aline.
"Darkness nightmare," said Amanda.
"Which means something bad happens tomorrow," said Aleesha.
"Oh joy," said Aline.
"Yeah," said the twins together.
"Anyone want more sleep?" I asked.
"NO!" they all answered together.
"Fine. I need to shoot something."
We found BA and Jack already down in the ranges, and she set us going on courses designed to stop you thinking about nightmares. It almost worked.
Twenty Two
The jump into the Death system was stressful, but uneventful. The shields held. The new emitters operating from Unassailable, gave us a secondary shield inside our normal shields.
To make sure we were safe, all the ships were linked up into one or the other shield. In addition, everyone was in full suit protection mode, connected into seat life support ports.
The sense of anti-climax was palpable. We didn’t die, the computers didn’t fail, Jane remained unaffected. Nothing out of the normal happened.
The one difference from being in a normal system was the sun. Normally at jump point distance, the sun was invisible. The HUD showed where it was, but it couldn’t be seen with the naked eye without magnification.
Death was a regular blinking dot to the side of the view ahead. There was something about it which bothered me.
"Jane, why can we see Death?"
"Where?" said Dick in a horrified tone.
He looked around wildly, and then got it together again. I grinned at him.
"Death the sun, not Death the reaper."
"You damned near gave me a heart attack!"
"Sorry."
The tension broke as people chuckled.
"Jane?"
"What's wrong with seeing a pulsar at long distance?" asked Annabelle.
"What' right with it?" muttered Grace.
"It's an anomaly," said Jane. "The rotation is in the milliseconds, which should be way too fast for the human eye to detect. Somehow, there seems to be a second, much slower, rotation going on. Which is impossible."
"The impossible is our stock in trade," said BA.
"But miracles always take a little longer," I added.
"Let's not complicate things," said Alison.
"Is it white?" asked Dick.
"To the human eye, yes," answered Jane. "Why?"
"Death rides the pale horse."
No-one took him up on this.
"Any effect on our shields?" I asked Jane.
"Very slight. We have a definite time limit in the system, but we're talking something like twelve hours, give or take. It would be enough to make it to the other side where there is presumably another jump point, but I’d hate to have to search for it first."
"Get us moving along the line to Prometheus please."
"Confirmed."
"Do we need the suits?" asked BA.
"Give me time to make sure," said Jane.
"We'll do our own checks as well," said Magnus.
She and several of her people unplugged, rose and left the CCC. Everyone was in safe zones, and as far from the outer hull as possible.
I reached for my pad, and remembering the nightmare, put it back in the holder.
We sat there watching the various monitors, as BigMother rapidly crossed hostile space. At the back of our minds was the hope we would be cleared to go back to 'slinky red' before we needed a toilet. While the suits could open the appropriate hole to allow us to go, the whole thought of that part of the anatomy suddenly getting a dose of gamma radiation, tended to induce crossed legs syndrome. The whole thought induced an intense déjà vu feeling.
Eventually, Jane put us out of our misery.
"You can rest easy," she said. "The shields are protecting us fully. The new emitters are cancelling out the gamma and x-rays effectively, and our normal shields are coping with everything else. There is a slight drain, but as I said before, we're talking twelve hours in-system without running into danger time."
As a group, we all shifted pretty much at the same time.
Angel was especially glad to not be in her suit any longer, and she sat on her pad and started in on a full bath. Nut joined her on the console and together they engaged in a lick fest.
By midday, while I was eating finger food Jeeves had brought in, Prometheus was large on the screens. Jane slid us alongside at a careful distance.
A tug launched from the Flight Deck, and proceeded to cross the gap between the ships. It came to a stop with the hull just outside its shields. A repair droid crawled out, and proceeded to do scans of the hull.
"Not good," said Jane. "The hull has very little integrity left. As far as I can tell, the insides aren’t as bad."
"Plan B then?"
"No, I don’t think that will work. Any sort of acceleration in her current state will likely rip her apart."
"Plan C?"
"In progress."
The repair droid had returned inside the tug, and the tug itself was moving now to the left Flight Pod. Once inside, the tug stopped next to an airlock. The repair droid exited, moved to the lock door, attached a power cable, and commanded the door to open. It did. The droid disconnected the power cable, moved inside, reconnected, and shut the outer door. It repeated the procedure for the inner door.
It looked like things still worked, as long as you supplied your own power.
"Droid isn’t in good shape Jon," said Jane. "But it's functional enough to get to the power generators. But the scans I'm getting are not promising. Even if we do get engines going, I think the same disintegration will happen as attaching tugs."
"Plan D?"
"Almost ready."
"What's plan D?" asked Amanda.
"We place a series of structural integrity generators around the hull to start with, and then use the tugs to supply a single shield. It won't be a very effective shield, but it should protect the generators for long enough, and make movement less dangerous. If we can't get the engines going, we'll use a pair of tugs to push her along on a direct course for the jump point, and let inertia push her through if they fail before she gets there."
"Let's get on with it,"
I said.
"Confirmed."
We'd taken nearly five hours to get there. It took nearly an hour to place the structural integrity generators and tugs, and create the full shield. Our shields were edging downwards all the time. By the time the tugs were ready, the repair droid had sent over enough data for Jane to advise not trying the engines. She fired up the front tugs very slowly, and Prometheus slowed to a stop, and started moving backwards towards the jump point.
We made full speed instead, and left Prometheus well behind us. The tension and novelty now well worn off, the crew went about their own activities, albeit within the safe zones of the ships. The simulators were used almost to capacity, as were the safe assault courses.
I stayed in my chair in the CCC, eyes going in a constant rotation across the screens with the important information on them. The closer we came to the jump point back into Pestilence, the more often my eyes took in the shield screen. We were cutting it fine. And we didn’t actually know exactly where the not enough shields point was. The stress mounted as the day wore on.
As Jeeves appeared to ask if I was eating dinner in the CCC, Jane jumped us out of Death. After a few minutes, she declared the ship safe, and we all had dinner in our normal places.
George was the only one who appeared not wearing 'slinky red'. Instead, he wore jeans and a white t-shirt, with black writing which read 'I survived Death!'
I pinged him to send me a copy, whilst holding my grin in.
It was obviously the topic of conversation on his area of the table at one point, as I heard someone say, "Isn't that just asking for trouble?"
Only time would tell if the cosmos appreciated the joke. Or not.
On my way out, Carter's daughter stopped me and asked if she could ask me a question. Not remembering her name, I had to dig it out of my PC. Jill. I waved in front of me, and I showed her into my suite, where we sat in my living room.
"How are you liking living on the ship?" I asked her.
"I love it. At first I didn’t think I would, but Jane showed me everything I needed."
"What do you do with yourself?"
"Study mostly. Mum won't let me fall behind. I've never been much for school, but your Library is incredible. I've never seen anything like it. Jane showed me how to do a search, and instead of conventional information coming back, it delivers six hundred years of accumulated knowledge."
This was news to me. Music, and flat and hollo screens, I'd brought with me from Outback. The rest sounded like Outback's copy of Galactica's main archive, continually updated in the centuries since she vanished. But how had Jane obtained a copy of it?
"Locked yourself into a study track yet?"
"Not yet. Mum wants me to consider medicine of course. And I may study it too. But for now, I'm doing a wide course which leaves all my options open."
"What can I help you with?"
She looked at me for a moment as if trying to figure out how to ask something. I smiled at her.
"I talked to the girl you stopped from being raped, down on Treasure Chest, before she left the ship. She told me what you did to the man. I bullied Mum into confirming it."
My smile died.
"And?" I prompted.
"How could you do such a thing to anyone, given the religious crap you believe in?"
Twenty Three
I started laughing. It took me a few minutes to settle down again.
"Sorry. I tend to forget that most people don’t know the difference between Spiritual and Religious. 'Religious Crap' is what people call spirituality when they don’t know the difference."
"It's all the same."
"No, it's not."
"Educate me."
"You really want to know?"
"I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t."
"Okay. The fundamental difference is that all Religions are Spiritual, but being Spiritual doesn’t require any religion."
"That's just silly."
"No it isn’t. There is a big difference. You sure you want to hear it?"
"I do."
I wondered about that, but had to take her at her word.
"Religion is first and foremost about worship of a being referred to as God, or Allah, or some other name, where said God has created man in his image. It’s a set of rules to live by, created around a social gathering where you worship. It gives people structure, organization, and a social group of people who all believe the same. But worship is directed through the church, and deviation from how the church says things should be is punished. They preach love, and practice intolerance of everyone who does not belong to their faith, usually without being aware of it."
"So you're automatically a heretic for saying so?"
She grinned at me, but I didn’t return it.
"I guess so. Religion is the first stage of being spiritual. It's great for those people who need order and structure, and a group of people to be with, with someone to lead them. The problem tends to be with extremists who pervert the message of love, to mean only love of those who hold their brand of faith. Not to mention the people who hold the control, and abuse it, or refuse to let people leave it."
"That’s about how I read it. And why I rejected religion years ago."
"As did I. I had a number of them to choose from at home, but I took bits from each one and made my own unique belief system."
"So you reject the structure, rules and groups, but retain some form of faith?"
"Yes. Sort of. Being spiritual involves two main things. Faith in something bigger than yourself, and trust that the cosmos is unfolding as it should."
"So you don’t believe in a God? Or do you, but just something not human like?"
"Personally, I believe in something higher than us, which exists as energy, and embodies the entire universe. Between us and it, there are various levels of beings, who help us to communicate with it."
"So not God?"
"God is a badly used word. Any sufficiently advanced being would be called a God, by those who didn’t understand what it could do. The Egyptians had theirs, as did the Nordics, Mayans, and just about every pre-modern civilization that pre-dated the religions which began in the last three thousand years. When science fiction came along, the whole God thing was taken to extremes, and eventually became ridiculous. A God could be anything, and a lot of the time was no such thing, just a being with a huge ego, and an army to enforce its will."
"So your energy field which binds the universe together, what do you call it?"
"The Divine. But that’s just my name for it. Although a lot of people use it."
"So what do you believe or do that is not religious?"
"Being spiritual is a personal thing. Instead of worship, we talk openly using our minds."
"You mean telepathy?"
"As good a word as any for it. When you quieten down your mind to the point where you do not have a single thought for at least ten minutes, you can ask a higher being a question, and hear its answer. And you know from the different volume, timbre, tone, syntax choice, and other differences, that this was not your own thought. It takes time to get used to, and to correctly identify who talks to you. And you need to remove the ones who talk to you who shouldn’t be, the ones coming from fear and hate. But eventually you talk only to the white light beings which represent the Divine."
"Not the Divine itself?"
"Sure you can. The Divine is very distinctive. But direct contact isn’t needed very often, and mainly you speak to ArcAngels or Ascended Masters. Those with an Indian history speak with the Deities, like Kali and Ganesha, who I have a lot of contact with. Some talk to the Nordic 'gods', knowing they are but higher level beings, the same as Ascended Masters. Jesus is an Ascended Master. The Buddha's are on the same level of existence."
"I still don’t see a difference."
"Being spiritual is having an awareness of the cosmos as it truly is, and communicating with it in harmony. It’s a respect and deep love for all beings, including those who
hate you. We strive for serenity in all things, no matter what is happening around us."
"And failing."
I laughed.
"Sure. It takes a lot of work to achieve serenity. I'm not there yet. But I'm only a few years older than you are, and I know people who have strived their whole lives and still haven’t managed it yet. It is something of an ideal, but one we actively work on all the time."
I looked at her for a moment. She didn’t say anything. I went on.
"Religions exist in a state of stagnation, holding on to centuries and even millennia old ideals, methods and practices, changing only slowly. Spiritual people are in a state of constant change, as they walk their spiritual path, and often their healing path, striving to raise their energy to oneness with the Light which is the Divine. Religions are big on punishing those who do wrong, and some of them absolve them of responsibility for their bad deeds, so they can do them again and again. Spiritual is about releasing, forgiving, and accepting, so the past is gone, and we can move into the future always improving ourselves. Those who do spiritual counselling often help religious people move beyond the restrictions of their religion. While confession and absolution are a good start, they are only a fraction of what a true karmic release achieves. Those of us who are spiritual talk out our failings with the higher beings, and seek to release them for good, not seek absolution from a minion of a god created in man's image, in order to just feel good about yourself and the bad you do."
"Hmmm."
"A lot of people never see the difference, often because they simply don’t want to. Throw the baby out with the bathwater sort of thing."
I spread my left arm out wide.
"This is where religion is on the spiritual scale of things."
I spread my right arm out wider.
"This is where spiritual people aim to be. There is a huge difference."
"Okay, if you say so."
"Don’t take my word for it. Read about religion. Jane will give you some reading about being Spiritual and how to go about it, and what we do to heal ourselves. The books I used myself when I was a kid learning all this. There's also discussions I've had with people which cover a lot of ground. Get Jane to play them for you. Make your own mind up."
Hunter Legacy 9: Hero at the Gates Page 12
