by Scott Rhine
“Okay. I’ll call Ivy from the port. Sorry I took so long to get back. I’ve never hotwired one of these buggies before.”
“Thanks,” he mumbled thickly. Roz continued to impress him.
“Nonsense. We misfits have to stick together,” Roz said. “Besides, you still owe me a date.”
Chapter 32 – Concussion Discussion
Roz flitted around her assigned shuttle frantically, performing preflight checks, but her eyes kept flicking back toward Max. She was ready to depart when Kesh arrived, glancing at her and then at Max. “A particularly violent mating?”
Max tried to laugh but coughed instead. “A jealous bodyguard with hired help. I’ll be fine once I get to my bunk and rest a week.”
“By the way, who is that Trout person your attacker referred to?” Roz asked.
Max groaned in pain to change the subject. As he undid his bowtie, he noted that the trigger finger on his right hand had been broken cleanly. He would need to apply a splint and tape two fingers together.
Reuben rushed into the shuttle cabin, carrying a large bag of party leftovers. “You refuse to give him his painkillers and then you interrogate him about past mistakes? What kind of monster are you?”
“Omigosh. He’s been on pills for the last week. Where are they?” Roz asked.
“Jacket. Right side,” Max said quickly, afraid to explain the tennis bracelet in the left pocket.
Removing two bottles from the tux jacket, Reuben brought them to his friend. “You owe me for that save,” he whispered.
Max dry swallowed the anti-inflammatory first. Ivy stopped him from tossing back the narcotic. “Not a good idea.” Ivy examined him and then closed her eyes. A few moments later, she announced, “Ribs look painful, but your organs aren’t in danger. None of the damage looks permanent, but you may have a concussion.”
He whispered in Ivy’s ear, “I didn’t tell them about you, even when they started breaking bones.”
She looked startled that anyone would have been asking but pretended not to have heard. “We should keep him awake for a few hours to be safe.”
“Sure. How do I do that?” asked Roz.
Reuben smirked. “Well … you are still on a date.”
Ivy elbowed him. “Ask questions.”
“How did you become a medical expert all of a sudden?” Reuben asked.
“My sister is a nurse,” Ivy said. “She taught me a lot about anatomy. If you’re a good boy, I’ll show you.”
Reuben swallowed.
Max interrupted the flirtation to give them instructions on how to set the broken fingers using equipment from his bag. As Roz taxied to the runway, he injected himself with a local anesthetic so he wouldn’t scream. Distracting her would be a bad idea.
Strangely, Kesh knew about setting broken bones and had strong, capable hands. “As you can imagine, I’ve been beaten for my sexual orientation on a number of occasions.”
After they were airborne, Roz asked, “How long are you planning on visiting Eden?”
“I won’t be going back,” Max replied.
Roz’s forehead wrinkled with concern. “I thought you had family here.”
“I visited Mom’s grave yesterday. She never had another child after my sister Alice died. Nkrumah left the planet to hunt legendary game somewhere else. I have no kin here. No roots.”
“Friends are the family you choose,” Ivy said as the tower cleared them for takeoff.
Max asked Kesh, “What cargo do you have so far?”
“The usual whole grains, which can be planted or processed for food; rare cactus fruit that I have a particular fondness for; seed cones from the Harmony trees, which can join roots in order to resist fire; geodes from the ocean floor; medicines, including a generous amount of your favorite nerve paralytic; perfume for both Human women and Bat funerals; handmade furniture, which we can use in our cabins on the trip and then resell; a giant, cryptid fossil for an interstellar museum; assorted fermented goods and the usual data.”
“Let me guess: twenty-year-old whiskey, rum, and wine.”
“Yes. We’ve filled every corner of the ship with merchandise except the last few staterooms.”
“What do you call your new partnership?” asked Ivy, to keep the discussion rolling.
Kesh replied, “We have not yet incorporated. Reuben will handle that detail.”
“If you include the astrogator, we’re all Human or pro-Human,” Reuben said. “The name should have some relation to that.”
“Space Monkey,” Max suggested, remembering years of insults.
The others laughed. Ivy said, “I like it. It has that ‘in your face’ quality.”
Reuben nodded. “But we have to balance it with something that warns folks not to mess with us. Ninja Space Monkeys.”
“Space Monkey Marines,” joked Max.
“Alliteration. Poetry is good,” said Kesh. “Space Monkey Merchant Menace.”
“Less military,” Ivy said. “Something that highlights your captain’s underworld connections.”
“But I don’t have any criminal background like the rest of the crew,” Roz objected.
Max cleared his throat. “To rescue me, you stole a car and assaulted three men—one of them a government official. By midday tomorrow, you’re going to have a wanted poster.”
Ivy laughed. “Go, girl. You’ve joined the mob.”
“The Space Monkey Mafia,” said Roz, more distracted than amused.
Reuben nodded. “Sounds like a cool band name.”
Max warned, “Those of Italian descent may be offended by the term.”
Reuben raised his hands in surrender. “Fine. You want boring and inoffensive? If this were an op, I’d call us Far Traveler Unlimited. No destination too distant, and no search too dangerous.”
Max said, “I was only a bounty hunter as a cover for this mission.”
“Do you plan on giving vaccinations with that dart gun in your bag?” Reuben asked.
“It’s for insurance.”
“Now you sound like that gangster Parro,” said Kesh.
****
After Roz docked the shuttle at the space station’s customs bay, Kesh and Reuben carried Max to The Inner Eye.
Roz almost tripped a few times gawking at the artistry of the Magi ship, inside and out. “These trees actually scrub the air for everyone aboard?”
Ivy followed with the food bag and kept Roz moving.
Together, they put Max in bed and packed him with ice. However, he refused to relax until someone brought him the diplomatic case and his gear from the shuttle. Reuben ran to comply.
Kesh excused himself. “It’s crowded in here. I’ll check upstairs with the copilot to see if the perfume orders arrived.”
“I’ll see if I can find a real cold pack in the doctor’s office or the cafeteria. Then I’ll get some of Roz’s things from her bunk on the station. Give me your badge,” Ivy offered. Roz handed over her ID, and Ivy wandered off to explore the cargo level unescorted.
Roz sat by his side, concerned. Her dress and the tux jacket were spotted with his blood. “What’s so important about the case?”
“Sanderjee collected information about where Jeeves may have come from.”
“Jeeves?”
The blanket in the closet rustled, and the creature shambled down to sniff Roz and the leftovers. Her eyes grew enormous, but she didn’t shriek. Instead, she held perfectly still. Max could make out four small limbs, not pseudopods. Had those legs been there before or was Jeeves imitating him over time?
“He must like you,” Max said with wonder. Or the fact that she isn’t CU positive. “He’s never shown himself to anyone else before. Hey, guy. Did Reuben forget to feed you today? Roz, would you put a handful of something edible on that plate?”
“Sure?” She did so, staring as the mimic shuffled over the plate and covered it with its body. “It looks like a pile of dirty laundry.”
“Exactly. Camouflage.”
T
hey watched it eat for a while. Eventually Roz grabbed a damp washcloth from his cramped bathroom and cleaned his face. “Who’s Trout?”
Max winced as she touched a bruise. “A huge mistake on my part. She was a spy who manipulated me to get information. Because of her, I’m banned from further involvement in Turtle Special Ops.”
Roz looked thoughtful for a moment. “Sometimes what appears to be a setback turns out to be God working in our favor. What are you going to do now that you’re free?”
“Finish fixing this ship and paying for its repairs by hauling cargo while we take its secrets back to the Magi home world. Echo wants to travel through Bat space in order to avoid people we may have met before. Our first stop is Prairie and then the corporate world Phoenix, where they grow power crystals.”
“Sounds like an adventure.”
“Pretty dull in subspace, but we’re hoping to discover some extraordinary things.” His gaze lingered on her kind face as she cared for him.
Roz distracted him with trivia while she swabbed his injuries. “I heard they originally wanted to name the Phoenix system DeBeers because of the wealth of crystals, but the oligarchs objected based on trademarks. So they switched to Marconi.”
“Because of the radio signals the star produces?” he asked.
“And he earned the Nobel Prize for crystal radios. Of course, another company already had that name as a trademark. Because the rebirth cycle of the mythical fire bird closely resembled the lifecycle of the power crystals, they went with Phoenix as the third choice.”
When Reuben puffed noisily down the hallway toward them, the mimic vanished in the blink of an eye. “How?” Roz asked.
Straight-faced, Max put a finger to his lips.
“How long do I have to keep him up?” Roz asked the Goat.
Reuben snickered. “Sorry. An hour. Give the meds and the ice a chance to do their job, and then I can check his pupils with a special meter from his doctor bag. I’ve seen him use it on the crew after a card game.”
“Why would card games cause a concussion?” asked Roz.
Max opened the briefcase and divided the contents between the other two. As it came from tech-starved Eden, the information was printed old-school, on paper. Perhaps Sanderjee didn’t want to risk electronic copies that could be snooped remotely. “I’m having trouble reading with one eye swollen shut and the other watering. You guys can tell me what the research on Jeeves says.”
Brushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear, Roz picked up the larger stack. “This is information about every possible sentient race ever investigated, by planet. They even have anthropological notes about the artifacts on Machu Picchu.”
“I’ve been there,” Max said, trying to impress her a little.
“The summary letter narrows the list of home worlds for Jeeves to three candidates.” She read the attached descriptions and tapped the paper. “Here. Scientists didn’t even know these creatures existed for the first ten years, until one crawled onto an engine block to warm itself.” She flipped through the pages. “This is a picture.”
“An infant,” Reuben confirmed. “The folds become more prominent as the creatures age.”
Roz scanned the relevant pages. “This is going to take a lot more than an hour to digest. Evidently, the Phibs were assigned to investigate their potential before the war. They must have fallen through the cracks.”
“Or were pushed there,” Max decided.
“I’ve always wondered, based on Drake’s equation, why there weren’t more intelligent species in the Union,” Roz said.
“Whose equation?” Max asked, fogged by the pain.
Patiently, she took a pen out of her purse and sketched a Milky Way whorl on a blank patch of a piece of paper. “Before first contact, Astronomer Frank Drake wanted to determine how many other civilizations there could be in our galaxy. While the odds of it happening were quite small in any one star system, the odds of it never happening were almost impossible.”
“Like the Birthday Attack in computer science,” Reuben said.
“Exactly.” On the Orion arm she drew a fish shape, defined by tiny gaps in the stellar cloud. “This is the tiny portion of the universe that we can reach with current star-drive technology. About 500 parsecs high and 1400 parsecs in each other dimension before the gaps are too wide to jump.”
“A billion parsecs, or a gigaparsec,” Reuben said.
“I told you she’s smart,” said Max. “That number was always too big for me to wrap my head around.”
“To put it into terms a Union Marine would understand, to cross the narrowest point at nearly two hundred times the speed of light, you would have to fly straight for twenty-three years. Following star lanes and making refueling stops would take over thirty years.”
“Which is why the war took so long to resolve,” Max said. “You were saying about Drake?”
“In the modern form of the equation, we further reduce the list to the star systems we can actually reach. To navigate in and out of a system, we need at least two stars of different magnitudes or a single star with several massive gas giants. In practice, that’s about 1.44 percent of all parsecs, leaving a mere 14.4 million viable star systems for travel. Allowing for moons, we should find up to 3 million habitable or terraformable locations in the Goldilocks zone.”
“Not too hot, not too cold, just right for water-based life,” Max said, happy that he knew at least one term in this discussion.
“If 1 percent of these worlds can sustain complex life, that’s thirty thousand variations to discover.”
Max shook his head. “Still a mind-boggling number. Each stable planet needs an average of a hundred years of terraforming before it’s usable.”
“If one in a thousand of those native life forms achieve intelligence, that’s thirty candidates for the Union. So far, there are thirteen—six members and seven protected.”
“I’ve heard even the old races have only explored 80 percent of the Gigaparsec,” said Reuben. “That means twenty-four likely. A lot of the civilizations might already be dead, like the Machu Picchu one.”
“But there would be evidence,” countered Roz.
“Maybe they’re insects,” Reuben suggested.
Roz wrinkled her nose. “Ick.”
“That’s never happened,” Max explained. “In my xenobiology class, the working theory is that the maximum size for exoskeletons limits them—similar to Galileo’s square-cube scaling law for bones, which makes giants impossible on land. Bugs just can’t grow large enough to achieve the proper brain capacity.”
“So you’re saying as many as ten civilizations have been buried for the sake of greed?” asked Reuben.
Max replied, “Maybe some of them didn’t pass their final test to enter the Union.”
“Even if half of them failed, that still leaves three or four unaccounted for.” Roz shook her head. “What can we do for the mimics?”
“Set the rest of them in the freezer free,” Max replied.
Reuben cleared his throat. “Uh … there were only five left. When the captain sold the last of the ore, they had a big party and ate them.”
“And you work for this monster?” Roz said, standing.
“Actually, the boss tricked Zrulkesh into killing himself.” Reuben waited until she sat back down. “The current captain is an accountant look-alike who couldn’t fly to save his life, which is why we need you.”
Max paused to yawn. “Please protect his secret. Tell no one outside the ship. Even if something happens to us, I made sure Sanderjee can investigate.”
The smile in Roz’s eyes almost made the beating worthwhile. “You’re a good man, Max.”
“Can I sleep yet? All this math talk is making my head spin.”
Reuben fumbled with the pupil reader with coaching from Max. After squinting at the results, he said, “You’re safe. Get some rest, and I’ll go see what happened to my date.”
After popping a few heavy-duty painkillers, Max n
estled into his pillow.
“I—I haven’t actually agreed to take this job yet,” Roz whispered. “I only took a couple vacation days.”
Already drifting, Max said, “Tomorrow, you’ll try the helm controls, and it’ll feel like home. You’re where you belong.”
Roz remained in the chair beside him, standing vigil.
Chapter 33 – Failsafe
Max jolted awake, jumping to his feet into a karate stance. He almost dropped to his knees from the cumulative aches and pains. Someone was pounding on his door. Roz opened it.
“We have a problem!” Ivy stood in his door, hair mussed and red, lacy underwear visible from where her dress was askew.
What did Reuben do now? Embarrassed, Max said, “Yes?”
“You were right.” Ivy handed Roz a folded uniform, including zero-g straps. “The sheriff just sent a coded transmission to station security. Of course, the staff doesn’t arrive on duty for another thirty minutes, and it’ll be a little longer before they haul their lazy butts to our cargo bay. Still, we have a narrow window before Roz ends up in the brig.”
“How do you know?” asked Roz.
Ivy averted her eyes. “Your computer pad has access to all unencrypted traffic, so I had Reuben set up an alert function.”
Max called out, “Minder, is the copilot aboard?”
“Negative.”
“Looks like on-the-job training,” Max said. “We need to get to the bridge. Is the captain awake?”
“Negative, but he has granted the rest of you access to the entire ship.”
Convenient. I wonder where Ivy has been tonight. Unable to unbutton or remove his bloody shirt over his swollen hand, Max slipped his tux jacket back on to cover the stains. He would rig a sling later.
After Roz ducked into the bathroom to change, he told the hairdresser spy, “You’re not part of this. You can leave while we’re doing the pre-flight check.”
“No. After being photographed with you all at the ceremony, my cover here is burned. My superiors are aware of your goals. As they align with ours, I’ve been instructed to give you every possible assistance.”
