Traveler_Losing Legong

by Tim Dennis

  The images before them shifted, some areas returning to the empty curved walls they were in reality. This frustrated Norte even more, Peto shifted his position to bring his head closer to Myles's side of the hatchway. away from Norte.

  "OK! No ships!" Norte said. "Give me pieces, show me components, you must have a storehouse somewhere!" Norte no longer yelled at Myles, she yelled at the ship itself. "Parts, repair!" Myles caught her eye and she turned on him. "Look! It's responding, see? Help me, if we both want it-"

  "I don't- what exactly do you want?" Myles asked.

  Norte let go of her efforts and quieted her voice. "Maybe it won't give me a ship, that might be pushing too far, but all we need, Tugot, is a navigation device, something I can take apart, adapt to our own ships. Think about it. There must be some training institute, a manufacturing plant, recycling center, someplace where we can slip in, grab an item or two and get back to Legong before anyone notices."

  "An antique store?" Myles wondered aloud. The images blinked back on, covering the entire pilothouse. "We don't know how long ago the technology was developed."

  Norte used all her strength to be patient while Myles thought it through.

  If we succeed in obtaining a navigational device Krykowfert and the Council will have no further justification for keeping Traveler or his ship.

  Do you think the Council needs a justification?

  Norte watched Myles's internal debate reveal itself on his face. She desperately wanted Myles to respond to a simple, direct order. For a brief moment she considered letting Peto give him another kick.

  "Myles," she said, "the future of Legong may rest on our success here. Your home, your family, even that screwy lizard in your backyard. Look what benefits Krykowfert's advances have already brought, the freedoms, the security." She continued to watch Myles closely.

  We've been here over an hour an no one has come near us or tried to contact us. Norte's right. If they know, they don't care.

  Myles continued his internal debate, covering every angle he could think up, never once bringing to the surface the real reason he hesitated. He didn't care about navigation, or ripping holes in space, or even Traveler. He wanted Earth. He wanted to step out onto it, walk around it, talk to people. Just looking wasn't enough. He could feel the planet reaching out to him, drawing him to it.

  Myles had feared Traveler was a unique person, but if Peto was wrong, if Traveler was truly from Earth, there may be entire populations of 'Travelers' down there.

  People I can communicate with, technology that doesn't require a screwy implant.

  "OK." He said. "We go down. We'll get your navigation device. I'll get your navigation device."

  She grunted and turned her mental focus back on her own wants. "Could be anywhere, a shop, a family heirloom, a school, a research institute..."

  The collections of smaller images faded away, leaving behind a view of one full hemisphere. It slowly rotated, centering on the eastern half of a large, mostly green continent. Ocean filled the north eastern edge of the hemisphere, extending down past the equator where it filled with a myriad of islands, continuing south and west below the continent. In the southern hemisphere a single, large island dominated, mostly desert.

  The pilothouse view shifted away, back to the continent, another desert intruding from the west. The view, or perhaps the ship itself, zoomed in to the mountainous southern edge of the desert, showing them rocky hills, dry lakebeds and deep blue skies. Norte thought she could see figures at the base of a rocky outcrop but the view spun away, tiny objects on the dry shore of a small lakebed. Norte imagined the sensation of movement as the ship skimmed along a dozen or so meters above the surface of rocks and sand. The distant objects became tiny pointed disks, resolving into a circle of tents.

  Norte remembered the figures she'd seen behind, near the rocky hills and instantly an image appeared inset, to the left of the tents. They were people, they had seen the ship, and two were already on their way back to the tents. Norte guessed they were about two kilometers distant.

  "Myles? I think this is it."

  Myles opened his eyes. Norte gave him a moment to take in the sights and then issued orders as gently as she could. "Put us in the middle, don't land, just hang there at one meter. Peto and I will drop out and be back in an instant." As she spoke the ship arranged itself exactly as she wished.

  I didn't do that.

  Norte saw shock and confusion on Myles's face. She spoke slowly and carefully. "Myles. I need to know exactly where the device is. Show me which tent."

  Myles didn't have time to even consider the request. The tents lost all covering, frameworks of metallic poles revealed interiors of obvious and obscure purpose.

  Norte looked at the tents. Myles looked at Norte.

  One tent contained bunks and trunks with a small space beside the opening cordoned off. Another held cooking facilities, with an open hearth in the center. Within a third, tables lined the sides covered with fragments of bone, broken stoneware and simple hand tools. The forth tent consisted of one large room with a smaller room near the entry, similar to the bedroom-tent. Pillows, soft pads, and a couple wooden tables ringed the inner space leaving a large open carpeted area in the center. Scattered across it were multiple little devices and machines. Norte called to Peto.

  "Get your pistol, we're going down!"

  Norte climbed out of the pilothouse and Myles scampered after her.

  "Oh no, Tugot. You're staying here." Norte held him back with a hand on his chest.

  "We agreed-" Myles started,

  "No time!" Norte countered. "Peto!"

  Peto drew his pistol and advanced on Myles.

  "Eh, fuck you." Myles dropped back into the pilothouse and watched the others drop from the outer hatch.

  Peto hit the ground first, and at Norte's order ran around the back of the tents to intercept the approaching inhabitants. Norte entered the tent, gathering up as much of the scattered devices as she could carry, running back and forth to the ship and shoving them through the hatch. She managed four trips before Peto connected with her implant. The presumed tent-owners were closing in, she ordered him back to the ship and climbed in herself.

  Norte yelled as she dropped into the pilothouse. "Go! Go! Go!"

  The ship jumped a few meters higher in the air and stopped.

  "Go!" She said. "Look!"

  The first of the desert people had reached the tents. He halted, looked up, and turned to the others quickly closing in. Myles stared at the man, an inset image focused, showing a close-up of the individual.

  He looks just like me, I mean one of us.

  What did you expect? said Pig. "He's human."

  "Tugot! Let's go!" Norte ordered.

  The ship jerked a little higher, Myles turned from the images to Norte, then back to the images. The ship dropped a few meters.

  "Tugot!"

  The desert people looked up at the ship, as if they'd heard Norte scream. They all took a couple steps back, the ship moved in to follow them, rising another meter as it did.

  A boot heel propelled Myles off his chair, head first into the images in front of him.

  "Get us the fuck out of here!" It was Peto this time.

  Myles's legs tangled beneath his seat, his back against the curved wall. "What the hell is your problem?!" He clambered awkwardly to his feet and chased a surprised Peto into the kitchen where the two engaged in an absurd slap fight. Norte followed, finding Peto backed against the counter, holding Myles off with a straight-arm as the two parried and thrust at each other with fingers and palms.

  "Stop it!" She yelled. "For Ark's sake, Tugot, we're about to be over-run by a hoard of Earthers. Get us the hell out of here."

  Despite his desire to make contact even Myles could agree this was not the best time and left Peto in the kitchen while he returned to the pilothouse. He paused at the hatch.

  "Tugot!" Norte called.

  Myles stepped back from the hatch and motioned for N
orte to look inside. When she did the desert was gone, replaced by a field of stars with the Earth rapidly shrinking in the distance. A moment later the dark skies of Earth shrunk away, replaced by the familiar asterisms of Legong.

  Surrounded by green forests under a lanai on the shores of a great equatorial lake, four women and a man sat in chairs of delicately woven reeds, watching images hovering over a low, glass-topped table. They sat dumbfounded, as the Myles's little ship spun and whorled, then zipped off into the stars.

  16

  Krykowfert sat in his second-favorite chair with a f'window suspended above his lap, examining records of recent surface impacts. Asha had opened her own f'window, using it to examine the Tugot farm in detail.

  "Can we live on Legong?" She asked.

  Krykowfert looked up from his task at the little girl beside him. "You liked the surface, eh? It's much different than up here."

  "I like the animals." She said. "I want to live on a farm."

  "Would you like a pet? Perhaps a lizard, like Mr. Tugot?"

  Asha thought about it for a moment. "I don't think a lizard would like it up here. It'd be better if I moved to Caldera."

  Krykowfert closed his f'window and took Asha's hand. "How about if I promised you that we would move to the surface, and you'd have animals, but it wouldn't be on Legong."

  She leaned across and pointed at the Tugot Farm. "I want to go to Legong."

  "Why don't you connect with that boy? What was his name? Maybe you can go down and visit?"

  Feric leaned in from the conference room.

  "I'm ready." she said.

  Krykowfert left Asha in his office and joined Feric in the conference room. The walls were covered in open f'windows, duplicating the views Krykowfert had already seen and adding many more. The roof of Harry's cafe showed prominently in one image. Feric pushed them all aside and placed a series of graphical representations of troops and equipment in their place.

  "The Council is taking every troop we de-mob." Feric said. "That's effectively slowed construction of new surface farms and all but halted growth in craft manufacturing."

  "Damn it! What's the point of having a parliament if the Council's just going to do end-runs like this?"

  "Disruption to the supply chain is contributing to rising unemployment." Feric said. "Two settlements, Pot-Holes and Two-Tree, are experiencing population drops due to emigration back to the orbiting stations."

  Krykowfert swatted away the images as Feric pulled them up. "Show me their staffing levels"

  Feric let Legong fade and pulled up two columns of images, one showing the newly formed Council Guard and its burgeoning hierarchy, the other showing the existing Shield Guard. Again Krykowfert stopped the flow.

  "What this?" Three ships of Krykowfert's new design appeared in the Council's column. "Have this design declared experimental and transfer all completed ships to the Eden project."

  "The Eden Project has been re-classified as a Basic Research," as Feric spoke Krykowfert leaned his chair back and huffed. "...and as such is unable to own material resources. I can transfer them to the Diverter Bases as development-"

  "Yes! Yes, do that. Form a new Division within the Diverter Class and transfer the material equipment from the Eden Project into it. We can keep building, just don't finish anything. Give each individual ship a Development number and class every mission as a Flight Test. Oh! Let the Council keep the ships they have now. And have R&D issue a white-paper alerting service crews to an unidentified flaw in their propulsion ring control."

  Feric smiled and dipped into her implant. Several of the smaller images switched to show Majors and Commanders wearing the traditional Shield Guard uniform, all giving their attention to Feric. Krykowfert took over the remaining images and returned them to their original arrangement, showing recent meteor impacts on Legong's surface.

  "Let's put that cafe owner-" Krykowfert started speaking before he noticed Feric was still deep in her implant connection. He also noticed Asha, standing in the doorway with her Nanny. "Is it that time already?" He asked, giving his granddaughter a hug. "Be good, study hard-" Asha finished the admonition with him, rolling her eyes

  "-and do what you're told, unless you disagree!" That always brought a smile to her face and a frown to her Nanny's. The two disappeared back into the outer office.

  Krykowfert focused intensely on the impact images. The cafe was the only built structure to be hit, but several meteors had fallen near settlements and one close-call had been reported with a Shuttle launch. Feric finished her current task and switched herself immediately to next issue.

  "Polar impacts are up four hundred percent; equatorials, five percent." She said. One of the images showed Harry's cafe, a square panel physically attached to the center of its roof.

  "This is that cafe in Caldera? It belongs to that S.I. Lieutenant's mate, right?" Krykowfert stopped the moving images and focused on the cafe. Feric nodded. "Have Legong Digest do a story. Let's see if we can get the people to call their parliamentarians and complain a little. Oh! And let's mount some guns near each major settlement."

  "You want me to divert construction resources-"

  "No. Take them off the Arks, one for each surface settlement. Take half from the orbiting farms, half from Central Command." Krykowfert pushed away all images except Harry's cafe. "That S.I. Lieutenant, you have her history?"

  Segueing neatly from issuing orders to opening f'windows, Feric displayed Bento's history, including medical details and neuro-type. Krykowfert sat tapping his chin.

  "Take her off Transport and put her on Construction. If she doesn't balk, give her the gun installs."

  Leaving the mess of images scattered around the conference room, Feric returned to her desk in the outer office while Krykowfert searched the refreshment table for something to nibble. He found a package of cookies and took it to his office, turning the lights low as he settled into his favorite chair. A Shuttle launched from one of the overhead Rails, a slight vibration was felt. Central Command was in Legong's shadow and his current view away from the planet, dark and starry. He caused the lights to shut off completely and watched the station's beam-weapons annihilate a cluster of falling meteors. Little flashes of light around the perimeter of the ship echoed by little flashes of light in the sky beyond.

  He quickly finished the cookies and considered visiting the Rim Bar. It wasn't typical for a Director to mix with the public in such a place but since meeting Myles there he'd developed an irrational fondness for the place. Feric came into the office.

  "We have telemetry on the Earth-ship's departure track." She said, opening a f'window as she dropped into a seat beside Krykowfert. The image aligned itself with the actual star field seen through the tr'indo above them. An exaggerated image of the Earthman's ship appeared, motionless to the stars, with a long track marked out ahead of it. "This is the first launch, to Eden." A second exaggerated image, this time of the planet Eden, appeared at the far end of the track. A second track traced a path from the ship, rapidly changing direction without moving very far, then shooting away into the distance, exactly opposite the first track. A second f'window opened, low above the counter beneath the tr'indo. With it the view zoomed, following the track, but looking backwards, towards its starting point. A strip of cartoon-like depictions of asterisms appeared along the bottom of the retreating star field: a ladle, an ox, two fish. One of the cartoon images leapt out of its place and laid itself into the star field.

  Krykowfert sat up, took a deep breath and looked at Feric. "Does the Council have this data?"

  "If we do," she answered, "they do."

  Councilor Six stood at the back of the room watching Pestano, Nod and Morgan, her personal Clerks, pretend to command thirty Council Guards seated at the four ranks of desks that lay between her and the changing images on the far wall. Pestano stepped briskly up to the wall and shifted images around.

  "We're getting something." He said.

  The wall became one continuo
us image of star-studded space, six meters wide and three tall. Two dozen little pink circles indicated the locations of Pickets, ships culled from Shield Guard. Pestano turned to face the room.

  "Display the current estimates." He said.

  The image spun a bit and deepened, filling the space between the wall and the front row of desks. Pestano stepped out of the image to better see. In the center of the pink-circled Pickets appeared a red funnel, broadening as it stretched away into the distance, a narrow tunnel extending into the room.

  "That's no better," Six said. "It's in the way."

  Pestano quickly removed the probability cone. Pestano stared, squinting and occasionally opening up an image closer to one of the Pickets.

  "I got it! I got it!" An excited Guard leapt from her seat and flung an image at Pestano. It hit the wall and expanded, slipping across until it found its place. Bubbling fingers of blue light popped in an out of the room. Before Six or her Clerks could issue an order the Pickets formed into a hemisphere around the wiggling strings. One string shrunk to a point then snapped into a tiny white circle. The other strings faded to nothing and the circle grew.

  The ring of light stretched and the Pickets fired. Two dozen Bell's Probes shot towards the hole as Traveler's ship slipped through it into Legong space. In a flash that overloaded the f'window's abilities the hole disappeared.

  There passed a long moment of silence. The f'window recovered. Traveler's ship moved quickly across it towards Central Command, orbiting Legong many thousands of kilometers behind them. A new orange circle formed in the middle of the dozen little pink ones, each of which now sprouted two orange lines. Guards made their announcements aloud.

  "Probe off target."

  "Probe off target."

  "Probe on target, late launch."

  "Probe off target."

  From one pink circle an orange line traced a path across empty space, ending precisely in the center of the orange target.