Jim Baen’s Universe
Page 64
When they ushered him into a semi-sterile room, he panicked. A new set of Dragon Ladies rushed forth and disencumbered him of his outer garments; olive drab overalls and a maroon sweater with elbow patches and matching knit cap replaced them. A particularly fierce Dragon Lady grabbed him and shoved two half-slipper, half-rugby cleat contraptions over his bare feet. After that, a pale red-haired woman who proved more terrifying than the Dragon Ladies arrived. She smiled and donned similar garb. He noticed she wore a Celtic cross layered with thick Gaelic sigils and some very not-Christian iconography on its edges.
They were dumped in a chute, which turned out to be the actual elevator. It was cramped and not the luxurious ride he had been led to believe existed. He and the woman huddled as the bubble rocketed into the air, faster than his lunch could follow.
“O’Malley.” He spoke between hyperventilating gasps.
“Cassie.” She threw her head back, clearly exhilarated by the ride. “You’re from the North.” She spoke Gaelic. “I saw your file. Worked in a pub, almost got a chemistry degree from Dublin, but you come from Belfast. Moved about the same time The Troubles were erupting and all those bombs started putting holes in Buckingham Palace.”
O’Malley frowned. “Where are you from?” She spoke Gaelic? She spoke fast in Gaelic?
“Kilkee, but I’m a Traveler.” It explained her dark eyes. Travelers were the gypsies of Ireland, though it was disputed if they were also Rom, like their Eurasian counterparts.
“My people are actually from Ballyclare, but yah. I was from Belfast. Not anymore.” He shut his mouth and ignored her until the slingshot of first acceleration slowed.
“Were you any good at chemistry, O’Malley?”
“I moved to Pontianak to tend bar at a local Irish pub.” He counted to twenty. “Why do you ask?”
“Malaysia had extremely porous borders with little oversight of foreign passports at the time; that meant…” She shrugged suggestively.
O’Malley rolled his eyes. His lunch had returned to its proper place. “How does a Traveler end up subletting her services to a Chinese spaceship company?”
She laughed and touched his shoulder. “I was visiting my sister Ling Ling, adopted. She works for StarDrive and when word came down that they needed an Irish religious expert, I apparently was the only one in Indo-Malaysia.”
“Wasn’t there a panda named Ling Ling?” O’Malley tried to pry his shoulder loose.
“Mom was extremely creative.” She smiled and kept her grip.
By the time they had arrived and the grim Chinese technicians lifted them from the capsule, O’Malley had discovered that Cassie liked groping men. It took him another few seconds to realize he still spoke perfect Gaelic, that his employers apparently knew what he used to do for a living and, most importantly, he did not like zero gravity one tiny bit. When they were ushered into the spinning sector with its two-thirds gravity, he breathed a deep sigh of relief.
Then a group of terrified looking Chinese engineers confronted them with The Problem. It boiled down to this: at twelve percent light speed the ship began to shake and shimmy, things got a little blurry and light got sort of fuzzy. At fourteen percent, the leprechauns started appearing. That was that.
The chief pilot promised them that they would be taken to the place where the little men showed up consistently; apparently no one had thought to film the operation. O’Malley tried unsuccessfully to suggest it. Instead the captain stiffly informed them the ship would again be at fourteen percent translight within the hour.
The two Irish nationals endured the preflight check and the acceleration out of the star dock. The gravitational spin of the starship’s twin hulls ceased, putting them in freefall. “You don’t believe in little men, do you?” He rubbed his protesting stomach.
“Cassie. And why not?”
O’Malley snorted. “Okay. First, because there are no leprechauns. Second, because if there were leprechauns, we’d have seen them somewhere other than outer space. And third, did I mention the part about there being no green bonnie men?”
“What is your first name?” She brushed his arm. He told her. She made a face. “What was your mother thinking?”
“Oh, no. Da had three jobs. First, making us, second, naming us and third, dying early enough to leave a pension to feed us. The rest was me dear Mum.”
“I think I’ll call you O’Malley.” The ship launched into some new phase of its altogether gut-wrenching throttle through space.
«Eight percent translight» a crisp voice informed them in Mandarin.
“All women do.” He tried not to grimace more than was necessary. Good thing they hadn’t given him tea with cream and sugar.
«Ten percent translight» The chairs started to vibrate oddly and his feet felt numb.
«Twelve percent translight» The voice sounded dubious. It might as well have screamed “Danger! Leprechaun Alert!” The light did seem a bit gooey.
“Did you know that the light in Ireland actually moves infinitesimally slower than normal light?”
“Whadya mean?” O’Malley turned his face to see her dark and clearly mad eyes.
“Scientists in County Cork proved it two years ago. The speed of light across most of Ireland is actually one eighteenth of one percent slower than the universal constant.”
“So what? Do you think that proves… ”
«Fourteen percent translight» came the terrified announcement.
POP! Something small, green and grinning stood three paces in front of them.
“Good morning,” said the leprechaun in lilting, if old sounding, Gaelic.
“Okay.” O’Malley pointed to the little man in his green suit, trimmed with gold brocade and buttons, shoes with brass buckles and a genuine shillelagh. Dimpled and thick nosed, exactly like the pictures, the elf stood two feet tall. “That’s a leprechaun.”
“Told you so.” Cassie smiled gleefully.
“You speak the Mother Tongue?” The leprechaun stepped closer.
“We do.” Cassie addressed the tiny elf in her own Southern Traveler’s Gaelic. “Hello, fey friend of Mab.”
The leprechaun bowed and kissed her hand. Suddenly he turned around, as if there were something coming up behind him. “Oh.”
Pop! He was gone just as the ship began to decelerate.
«Kill engines, kill engines!» Apparently the crew did not find the little men as reassuring or polite as Cassie did.
The captain reestablished gravity and raced back to the pair. Had they seen them? Yes. Now what, he demanded? It took all O’Malley’s ombudsman training and quite a bit of convincing to explain that they were going to have STAY at fourteen percent translight for a while. That assumed the
Chinese wanted him to actually hold a conversation-with, yes, he admitted they were obviously something-these guys who looked like leprechauns.
In the end he got the guarantee of a night’s sleep in semi-gravity while the crew radioed HQ and received further orders. O’Malley tried a toothpaste tube of something called General’s Chicken Paste Number Four and gave up trying to have an appetite. Then he padded as quietly as possible to what seemed like a secluded nook. It provided a bed contraption that folded out, an air mattress and solar blanketing with electric toe warmers. He looked left and right, saw neither a pagan woman nor men of any height, Chinese or Irish, and tried to go to sleep.
He wasn’t sure if he had been asleep or merely in that sweet dozy place right before actual sleep when he felt her slip into his bed. “Cassie?” As if some other nearly six foot, mostly naked and highly aggressive woman with red hair would sneak under his sheets.
“It’s me.” She began kissing his neck quite effectively.
“You’re a stranger.” He squirmed away.
“Not anymore.” She rubbed his back.
“Um, I’m not that kind of girl.” He wracked his brain for a better line.
Cassie laughed. “When in Indonesia, do as the Indonesians.”
“But we’re in outer space. And I have to figure out why there are leprechauns here.”
“Why not ask them?” She blithely drifted off to sleep, apparently satisfied with merely having gotten in to his bed on day one. It seemed an incentive to solve the situation before day two.
On day two they managed to do the meet and greet with the leprechaun, find out his name was Tibbles of Green Burroughs and that Tibbles seemed astonished that they did not believe in him. Then came the hysterical screaming, the deceleration and the heinous accusations from terrified Chinese pilots who had to call the dread Chief Han and report Complications and, worse, Delays. Cassie’s suggestions gave O’Malley his first headache in a decade.
O’Malley tried barring the door using a special computer code. She apparently could hack those. Thankfully, she contented herself with merely riding the night through holding him in her arms.
By day five, he had given up hope of evading Cassie at night, Tibbles by day, and the hysteria of the entire StarDrive Corporation pretty much constantly. The woman could get through furniture, welded doors and air locks.
“Why don’t you make yourself useful?” He jabbed her when they woke up on day six, she having found him buried in the cargo section under a heap of welder’s tools.
“I’ve been trying.” Cassie pinched his cheek. “But you apparently missed a couple pages out of the manual. Goddess magic is usually sex magic and you keep avoiding me.”
O’Malley scratched his head. She had a certain logic. “But there isn’t any magic, Cassie.” He had to admit the thought of sleeping with her seemed quite appealing, it always had. He just wasn’t that kind of girl.
“How do you think I got through welded doors, silly?” She ran her fingers along his forearm.
“Um, I was wondering about that,” he confessed. “But magic?”
“Magic.”
“Well, if you can do magic to open my doors at night, why can’t you do other magics?”
Cassie sat up from their secret bed; tools crashed as they fell off of her. A frightened mechanic jumped and ran, yelping something. “You really don’t understand, do you?”
“What?” O’Malley felt very queasy.
“Didn’t you have a grandmother?”
“Drank herself to death.”
“Aunts, older female relatives, the little old lady down the alley?”
“Blown up or shot by the Ulster Unionists or Orangemen, except for the old lady down the street who taught me how to make pipe bombs.”
Cassie shook her head and kissed his forehead. “Well, if you had a nanna, she would have told you lots of stories about the olden times and magic and the Celtic knots, the runes, the secrets of the Picts and such, our own weavings and doings.”
“I’ve read the books.”
“Do you know the difference between blood magic and circle magic, between weavings and callings, between unions and dispersals?”
O’Malley looked her in the eye. She seemed neither mad nor gleeful. In fact, Cassie looked outrageously serious, exactly like the Chinese pilots talking about their Pulse Drive buttons. “That would be a, um, a no, I guess.” He grew quiet. What if she wasn’t crazy?
“I can’t call forth a fairy circle without some base of power and, unfortunately, there isn’t any in outer space. But I can use you, and to do that I have to use a weaving and a union. The easiest way would be to sleep together but if you’re absolutely hell bent to avoid my embrace, I can probably just drain half your blood and set up some kind of kettle in the back.” She gave him a wicked leer.
“Why sex, why blood? There’s no logic in it.” He hated the sight of his own blood. He opted against telling her his fainting stories.
She smiled. “On the contrary, if you had read your quantum physics textbooks better, you’d know that in 2011 Australians found a link between indigenous song lines, genetics and quantum flux readings.”
O’Malley rolled his eyes vigorously. “That’s a joke.”
She shook her head. “It really is mind over matter. But within set parameters determined by the magical systems, quote unquote, of the people involved. We’re Irish, we gotta use traditional Irish protocols.”
“Protocols? Cassie, you just said it was magic.”
“You never took physics did you?”
O’Malley frowned. “Since when did any textbook claim that magic had a scientific verifiable basis in quantum physics?”
Cassie didn’t hesitate. “Strock and Tadeschi, The Secret Life of Particles, 2012, published by Springer-Verlag. Followed by about seven more knock-offs and coat-tail studies.”
He gulped. “Well, let me think about it for the day.”
By the time they rose, the usual suspects had come to the cargo hold. They informed them with hidden embarrassment that the pilot, co-pilot and top four engineers had been shuttled down for psychiatric care and a new pilot would be taking them to fourteen percent today. Would immediately be too soon, please and thank you? He imagined they did not want to report to Chief Han that strange Europeans sleeping in their cargo hold was their sole sign of progress.
They did the drill. Strap in, hysterical announcement, null gravity, eight percent, ten percent, twelve percent - everything fuzzy, witty comment from Cassie and then fourteen percent. Pop! Mr. Tibbles arriving, obviously annoyed to be still talking to them.
O’Malley tried a new tack. “I thought you were a myth.”
“Of course we’re real, you idiot.”
Tibbles reddened. “You’ve been sighting us for centuries.”
“Near rainbows, on the ground, not in outer-freaking-space,” O’Malley spat back and Tibbles grew beet red.
“Morons,” he muttered. “What is a Pulse Drive? It’s a fancy laser that splits and refocuses light into thousands of fractal pieces, sort of like a mini fusion reactor… Forget it. I can see you know nothing about science.”
“Absolutely nothing.” O’Malley knew exactly what a Pulse Drive was, since he had been reading schematics all day.
“Rainbow. Splits light. Pulse Drive. Splits light. Whenever you split light, we show up. We’re energy beings, you dolt.” Tibbles looked ready to smack him with the shillelagh.
“What about werewolves and vampires?” O’Malley sneered.
“Out of phase, their energy signature cued to moonlight and reflected shadow. Mirrors, moonlight, everything is reflected light, it’s all in the angles of reflection. Man, you’re pretty stupid.”
“Ghosts?” O’Malley leaned back in his seat; Mr. Tibbles’ stick had begun to sway dangerously close to his head.
“Negative infrared signatures of dark matter. Your physicists have been blabbing about the stuff for decades. Why do you think they make it so cold?”
“So you’re real?”