Worlds Apart 02 Edenworld

by James Wittenbach

  “Nay, none of it.”

  Eliza Jane shrugged. “My mother used to believe that if you did something you weren’t supposed to, all you had to do was perform some ritual chanting and your sin would be forgiven.”

  “Which religion was that?”

  “The one with the celibate functionaries. I forget. She didn’t practice much.”

  “I’m just not supposed to sin in the first place,” said Matthew. “How old were you when your mom disappeared? I always forget.”

  She sighed. Where she had grown up, the concept of years had been meaningless. “I was 8,200 hours old. That would have made me about ten and a half years old on Sapphire or nine years old on Republic.”

  “Hoy!” someone shouted from across the bar. They turned to see Tactical Commander. Redfire approaching, a statuesque blonde on his arm whom they recognized at Flt. Capt. Jordan of Flight Group Alpha, the Burning Skies.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” said Redfire. He was smiling, uncharacteristically festive. Perhaps he had been drinking. Jordan looked vaguely annoyed.

  “Here I am,” said Matthew levelly.

  “That’s right, there you are. You’re there, aren’t you?” He seemed terribly ebullient. “I just wanted to know if you had any insight into our forthcoming mission.”

  Matthew frowned suddenly, some of his goodwill evaporated. Eliza Jane looked at him quizzically. “He thinks I’m a pre-cog,” Matthew growled.

  “Why?” Eliza Jane asked.

  Matthew shrugged. “Because some things happened on Meridian. I had some dreams. It was probably because of the tachyon generator buried under the city.”

  “Back me up on this, Roebuck,” Redfire said. “You were there. On Meridian.”

  Eddie Roebuck quaffed another ale. “I was there, assol.”

  Redfire stared Matthew hard in the face, deathly serious. “Look, pre-cog or not, I want to know if you think anything is going to happen.”

  Jordan looked uncomfortable, and gave Redfire a tug on his arm. Eliza Jane spoke up.

  “Precognition is the rarest of the high gifts... and almost invariably given to women.”

  “The High Gifts are nothing more than the residual effects of colonial-era genetic engineering,” Redfire scoffed.

  “Strewth,” Roebuck interrupted. “There’s a lady back in Halifax, a, wha’d’ya’call’it... a seer. Has a little shop on the east end of Highborn street. Everybody went to see her, ‘cos she could tell you when things were going to happen. She told Barnes Asahi to stay away from the Platinum Festival or he’d suffer ever-lasting misery.”

  “And what happened?”

  “He met a girl and they got married.”

  There was silence around the table. Eddie looked from face to face. “A fat girl,” he explained.

  Redfire clapped Matthew on the shoulder. “Lt. Driver, I know you are a decent man. Your forethought might have saved our lives back on Meridian. If you do have any precognition, you have to do the decent thing and let me know if there’s anything I need to watch out for.”

  Matthew looked into Redfire’s eyes. Was he serious, or was he playing Matthew for a fool?

  “You want to know what you’re going to experience on the planet? I’ll tell you. It’s going to be cold and it’s going to be dark.”

  Redfire rolled his eyes. “We all know I’m going to the dark side of the planet. What else?”

  “I don’t know what else. That’s what I’m trying to get through to you.” He felt Eliza Jane take his hand. He turned and met her eyes.

  “Come on, Matthew, give him a prediction.” Maybe he’ll go away. He turned back to Redfire and studied him up and down. He took a sip of the lime drinkthe and/oroid had brought. He tried to think of something to say when he turned his attention to Flt. Capt. Jordan, who seemed as irritated by the conversation as he was. Then, he spoke in deep serious tones. “You’re going to meet a beautiful, exotic, dangerous woman,” he said. “And you’re going to fall madly in love with her.”

  Redfire looked to Jordan, who had begun to laugh. Redfire steamed. “Let’s go,” he growled to Jordan.

  “Well done,” said Eliza Jane. She cast her gaze at Jordan and Redfire, as they walked away looking after them. “Are they really married?”

  “I understand they are this week,” Matthew answered.

  Chapter Three

  Captain Keeler’s Suite

  “Too bad you won’t come with, kitty-cat. You’d probably like it.”

  Captain Keeler was talking with the creature... one of the creatures … that shared his lavishly appointed living quarters. The creature in this case was a large tomcat, gray with black stripes and a white bib and paws. His name was Queequeg. Queequeg stared at him with large green eyes and flicked his tail.

  The captain continued enthusiastically. “From the probe data, it looks like the whole planet is just bursting over with warm, sunny beaches for you to lie on.”

  “I hate to get sand in my fur,” the cat said. “And your landing zone is no where near a beach. Trust me, I was lurking in the air duct when they picked it out.”

  “You used to run outside all the time back in New Cleveland.”

  “This is different. Cats are territorial, but not big on traveling… especially to new planets. You remember the shuttle that took us to the ship in the first place?”

  “I remember non-stop howling until I had you secured in a sleeper unit. You’re lucky I didn’t put you in the cargo hold.”

  “Exactly my point. I am comfortable and adapted to the environment of this ship. The only way I’d leave is if it was on fire.”

  “We may find Earth, someday,” said Keeler. “Then, what will you do?”

  Queequeg lifted a paw and examined the underside. “A hundred billion stars in the galaxy, thousands of lost human colonies. I don’t see us finding Earth in my lifetime, pal, if there even ever was an Earth.”

  Keeler would not be baited into debating the existence of Earth. They had had this argument before, and Keeler was certain Queequeg did it just to annoy him. He hurriedly packed a few last things into a carry-on. He wasn’t sure what exactly to bring. The Landing Team Procedure recommended only a change of uniform, toiletries, and less than one kilogram of personal effects. Everything else would be provided, the manual assured.

  “What are you going to do while I am gone?”

  “Same things I do when you’re here. Sleep. Eat. Sleep. Stare. Sleep. Eat. Sleep. Cat business.”

  “Cat business?”

  “You know, running through the service tunnels, staring at the wall, checking for rodents and all that other stuff I do that you don’t understand. Cat business.”

  The captain regarded his animal. There was a longstanding philosophical debate whether a cat with enhanced intelligence was still fundamentally a cat. Keeler shoved an anthology of colonial myths into his pack. “A dog would go with me to the planet,” he muttered.

  “Hey, go ahead! Get one of those slobbering, toilet-drinking, butt-sniffing, poop-dropping, dirt-rolling, excrement-licking, kibble-snarfing, drool-buckets. I bet you’ll have great conversations. ‘Hey, Mr. Dog, what do you think of the planet.’ ‘Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, duh!’”

  “I sense inter-species rivalry.”

  “You sense well-founded contempt for an inferior race.” Queequeg arched his back and stretched. “You go ahead down to the planet and do your business. I’ll stay on the ship and... you know... keep an eye on things.”

  Keeler put his two packs on the floor next to the entrance to his quarters. Queequeg leaned forward, as though to sniff at them. Keeler petted the back of his head, which Queequeg enjoyed like any other cat.

  “You know,” Keeler mused, “sometimes I think three-quarters of everything that happens on this ship I don’t have the slightest clue about.”

  “Try ninety per cent,” Queequeg suggested. “But if any of it were important, I’d let you know.”

  Primary Command/Main Bridge />
  Three hours before the scheduled launch of the Aves, Eliza Jane Change reported to the Main Bridge, or Primary Command One (both names were in common use among the crew) for her first watch as Commander of Pegasus. That phrase, she thought, had a really nice ring to it. Until Capt. Keeler or Tac. Cmdr. Redfire returned from the surface, or Exec. Cmdr. Lear was judged fit for duty, the ship was hers.

  In the Mining Guild, commands were purchased. A lifetime of scrupulous work and saving

  — or unscrupulous gambling and thieving — went into the purchase price of a mining frigate, transport, extractor, or processing ship. If she had stayed in the Guild, she thought she probably would have purchased a large shuttle-craft, and earned her keep transporting guilders and small packages from ship-to-ship and from ship-to-surface, and that would have been a good life. When the Guild had coerced her into joining the Odyssey project, she had already saved more than 40,000 Guild credits. Rather than let the Guild re-absorb that money into their pension fund, she had given the entire sum to a dark-eyed troublemaker she had befriended on the Guild Outpost on the third moon of Ronin.

  Pegasus’s Bridge was large, but still seemed inappropriately small to a ship more than 4,200

  meters long, with almost 7,000 people on-board and enough weaponry to blast every world in this system to gas and dust many times over. On this, the fourth watch, about twenty crewmen tended to monitoring the various stations. Most of them sported an interface, a growth of plastic and light knitted to the face or arm to provide direct neural link to ship systems. The ship created them using molecular knitters, and they disappeared when one was off-duty. In Hyperspace, when she navigated, the interface covered most of her body. She much preferred having her skin smooth.

  PC-1 was shaped something like the lower jaw of a canine animal, a chunky parabola divided into an Inner and Outer Bridge, but the Inner Bridge had been little used since initial launch. Personnel on the Outer Bridge were clustered by functional area — Engineering, Science, and Environmental Control were located behind the command area. In front of the command area were the Core Stations — Navigation, Tactical, Operations, and Communications. These were the people with whom she would spend seven out of every 28

  hours for the duration of the mission, and she surveyed them carefully. At the Main Operations station sat Specialist Shayne American, a dark-skinned Republicker with close-cropped blond hair and a lithe, but fabulous, body. Eliza Jane Change knew her well. She was quick and smart and Change regarded her highly. Navigation and Ops were occupied by the McCormick twins, Cassius and Claudius. They had been inseparable from the time the egg split in the womb. Something about them made her uncomfortable, but so long as they performed their jobs, she found them tolerable. Communications was occupied by Specialist Nerick Matra, a very large (but not fat), smooth-faced and oafish-looking sort. If she didn’t keep an eye on him, she knew he would munching snacks at his station and leaving crumbs all over for the following watch.

  “Command-on-Bridge,” announced Lt. Northrop, a senior officer in the Technical Core, rising from the command chair. She was a Republicked female, a few years older than change, and a pale as most from that solar-radiation deprived planet. She handed Change a data-pad.

  “Here’s the status report.”

  “You are relieved,” Change said. She sensed that Northrop did not like her. She did not care. She glanced down and saw that the ship was at Tactical Condition Four. No current or potential threats to ship security. Forward pulse cannons will be off-line for forty-minutes for regularly scheduled diagnostic.

  “Report, Ops.”

  Cassius (or was it Claudius) reported. “All ship’s systems function at optimal levels. Flight Ops reports all landing teams prepped for launch on schedule. All launch systems at optimal. Final systems check-out to be complete next hour.”

  “Navigation, position report.”

  Claudius (or was it Cassius) reported. “Our position is currently 20,020 kilometers above the Eden colony. Our maximum orbital distance is 21, 530 kilometers. Our minimum orbital distance is 19, 990 kilometers. We are maintaining a pattern of gravitational force vectoring to maintain orbit.” This last was necessary because of the gravitational pull of the planet Eden orbitted. Pegasus was continually being pulled off-track by the planet, the rings, and the other moons. “Communications.”

  Matra reported. “No communication from the surface. All ship’s systems functioning normally.”

  Change nodded and settled into the command chair. “All right. Specialist Matra, patch the Bridge through to the launch bays. Put them on forward monitors.”

  As Matra brought up the request, she accessed the list of Command Priorities Lt. Northrop had included on the Status Report. She saw that her top priority was to launch the Excursion Teams. Under that heading were a list of routine details, maintain contact with the landing teams, track Aves to the surface of the planet and ensure surface contact, and tracking mission progress. There were a few sidebar notations regarding anomalies in surface composition and atmospheric haze resulting in the inability of probes to map the surface below 1-meter resolution. This was described as an “unexplained anomalous dampening effect,” which the Planetary Survey section was trying to resolve.

  After the team excursion came a number of ancillary and routine duties, supporting and over-seeing the survey of (probable) Eden and the rest of the system, monitoring the functions of the ship’s many interoperating systems.

  Midway down on the list was a notation that made her eyes widen ever-so-slightly. “

  Disciplinary Action —Tech. 3C Eddie Roebuck. Insubordination. Dereliction of Duty.”

  “No slag,” she muttered quietly, and requested details.

  Apparently, Eddie had ignored reprimands from three lower levels of authority, and his case was now in her lap. She wondered what her options were. The status report let her cross-reference to the ship’s command protocols. The recommended course-of-action was to order Eddie Roebuck to report for his next duty-shift, or face revocation of all access privileges to the ship’s amenities and confinement to quarters.

  To herself, she wondered how much that would bother him.

  In the Mining Guild, she had been called upon more than once to discipline crewmen, sometimes even people with whom she had a social relationship. She had always done as she was ordered. If a worker had abruptly quit, as Eddie had, she would have put him off the ship at the next Outpost and had his wages forfeited to the Guild. No hesitation. Out here, things may have been different, but that did not matter. She made a note that she would dispatch a personal message to Eddie Roebuck two hours into her watch. She hoped Eddie would have enough sense to comply.

  Launch Bay Alpha – Deck Minus 10, Section 90:20

  The landing teams were assembled in the Aves Pre-Launch Bays, which were set in great cavernous expanses of Pegasus interior, four decks deep and wide enough to accommodate a dozen of the ships at once. The mission Aves sat atop their launch platforms, looking like great powerful birds of prey, their iridescent wings gleaming and poised for take-off. The forward section was shaped like a viper’s head and topped with a large, dark canopy over the command deck. The main cabin stretched behind briefly, then blended into the wings below the squat dome of the ship’s primary reactor and gravity engine (GE). On either wingtip was a Shriek, great wing-shaped utility ships that could be detached and used as scouts or fighters. The final make-up of the teams had been established shortly before Pegasus made orbit, and were clustered around their ships. Each team consisted of fourteen people - seven per ship. Keeler moved into the Landing Bay, accompanied by Redfire and Morgan. Keeler was staring intently at a Datapad, that displayed the breakdown of his landing team: Team Commander

  Captain Keeler, William R

  Flight Officer

  Flight Lieutenant Toto, Blade

  Tactical

  Marine Lieutenant Honeywell, Adrian K

  Tactical

  Marine Specialist Butte
rcup

  Logistics/Technical

  Technician Specialist Kwasnievski, Hiroshi

  Flight Alternate Flight Lt. Embraer, Columbine

  Medical

  Medical Technician Bihari, Indra

  Quite a party, he thought to himself. He was passing the Aves George, when he saw a familiar face standing in front of it, a handsome young man with curly black hair and a touch of ruddiness about the cheeks. He halted, turned toward the young specialist.

  “Specialist....”

  “Alkema, David Alkema.”

  “I did not know you were up for ground-duty on this mission.”

  “I’m assigned to Lt. Morgan’s team, on the George. ”

  “The Hell you are.” Alkema had made a strong impression during Pegasus’s last mission, to the planet Meridian. When the ship’s central braincore had spawned Caliph, who had taken over the ship and threatened to destroy the planet, Alkema had worked non-stop, devising an alternate communication network, and generally supporting all of the ship’s functions with unwavering enthusiasm.

  Keeler quickly glanced down his list. “Kwasnievsky,” he called out loudly and mispronounced. “Come over here, I’m swapping you out for Alkema. Nothing personal, I’m sure you’re a first-rate technician-specialist, but I like the way Alkema kisses my butt.”

  Kwasnievski shrugged, lifted his pack, and crossed the bay to change places with Alkema. Alkema took out across the bay to take his position next to the crew of the Zilla. Keeler made the appropriate notation in the log and caught up shortly. He walked directly to the man who wore the dark blue trim of the Flight Core.

  “Your name would be...?”

  “Blade Toto, Flight Lieutenant Blade Toto of the Aves Zilla. ”

  Keeler looked him up and down. If he was older than nineteen, Keeler would eat a pound of diced earthworms cold and raw. He was tall, but lanky, and his hair short except for some improbably long bangs that hung just above two sharp brown eyes. His face looked hard, and determined despite his youth. His uniform bunched at his waist and hung loose elsewhere. He wore Marine-type combat boots with his Flight Corps uniform and a patch on his jacket displayed the logo of the Fighting Wombats of Graceland A&M. Those were two obvious uniform code violations, and Keeler was almost sure he’d find more.