SPECTRAL VELOCITY
Margo Bond Collins
Spectral Velocity © 2017 Margo Bond Collins
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SPECTRAL VELOCITY
She never expected Earth’s destruction to prove her salvation.
From aboard her ship the Rapunzel-320, New Terran colonist Cybele helps plague-ridden, war-torn Old Earth avoid total destruction by sending down medical supplies.
Her budding romance with the Earth-bound technician Finlay is both forbidden and risky. But their relationship risks more than simply exposing New Terra to Earth’s inescapable plague.
If what they believe is true and Earth’s near-destruction is connected to a new spaceship they discover, everything they believe might come under attack—and they might not survive.
Chapter 1
“Rapunzel-320, do you copy?” The slightly mechanized voice buzzed through Cybele’s headset—an utterly unnecessary piece of equipment given her communications implant, but one that she donned every time she took the pilot’s seat, exactly as Earth’s protocol required.
“Copy, ground control. I’m ready to drop the line whenever you say the word. Over.”
“Hold that, Rapunzel-320. Maintain altitude.”
“Copy that.” Cybele tapped her forefinger against the control panel impatiently, waiting for the moment she could dip down into the atmosphere and ride the currents. That was really the only reason she looked forward to these trips down-planet.
At least, that’s what she told herself.
It has nothing to do with a chance to speak to another person.
Another lie.
And one person in particular?
Absolutely not the reason to look forward to this day.
The biggest lie of all.
She was almost at the end of her tour of duty here at the ass-end of the galaxy, doing what she’d initially considered playing nanny to a planet full of plague-ridden indigenous Earthers, descendants of those who’d refused to leave when the fate of humanity’s planet of origin became clear.
The ones who now relied on the generosity of the colonies to replenish the old homeworld’s microbiome in order to keep overwhelming disease at bay.
10 years.
That’s how long would’ve passed by the time Cybele got home, back to New Terra, most of it spent in cryo—humanity’s faster-than-light drives still weren’t quite able to cut out all the travel time, despite what the R&D guys had been promising for a generation.
Four years out here, four years home—all gone in cryo-induced dreams. But it was the thought of two long years spent on weekly drops to the citizens of Earth that ate away at her soul. Or it had, until she met Finlay.
“Rapunzel-320. Position and hold.”
“Copy, ground control. Positioning.” She smiled as she recognized the voice. “Finlay, that you?”
“Hi, Cybele. Glad to have you back.”
“What’s the hold up down there?”
She could almost feel the hesitation coming up through the airwaves as Finlay tried to decide how much to tell her.
“Nothing unusual,” he finally said, his nonchalant tone too studied to be believable.
Cybele allowed her own skepticism to come through. “Want to try again?”
“Just a placement issue. And it’s fixed. Send down the hair, Rapunzel-320.”
“Dropping line.” With one hand on the controls, Cybele carefully lowered the telescoping pipeline toward the water facility on the ground. Getting it just right was like threading the eye of a needle with a single hair, even though Cybele knew that both the line and the target would seem enormous if she were to stand next to them.
Of course, standing next to them would mean standing on the ground, and that would mean exposing herself to the Gotha Plague—the entire reason she was here, piloting the medical supply ship that provided relief to those who still lived on Earth.
Most of the pipeline had unfolded on its way to the ground, dropping through the air over the ruined cities with their contaminated water supply. Cybele flipped her goggles over to VR to finish the process, standing and stretching her arms over her head before making her way into the more immersive experience. Inside the virtual reality, Finlay was waiting for her.
“Hey,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you would make it in time.”
“Wasn’t sure I’d need to come,” she said, a smile quirking up one side of her face, even here in the interface.
Finlay rolled his eyes, but he was smiling, as well. There must’ve been someone monitoring the communication system, or he would have said something more openly flirtatious. As it was, Cybele didn’t need him to say the words. He knew she would be here to see him, whether or not she needed to manage the threading process herself.
They worked together mostly in silence, their physical movements in VR translating to commands that guided the giant line into the planetary water filtration system. After a while, once they were truly alone, Finlay called up an image to float in the air in front of her—a silly pictogram taken from a civilization long dead and crumbled, its remnants dotting the planet below, slowly being overtaken by plants and sand and decay.
This particular image was a two-dimensional representation of a perfectly round, smiling face in an improbable color, with a matching hand waving next to it. It was one of hundreds of such images she’d found in a database of Old Earth languages.
Cybele had shared it with Finlay early on, and in the last two years, it had become their private language, only partially decipherable by anyone who saw it.
“Hi,” she said, carefully neutral. Finlay replied with a stylized image of a heart, his usual signal that he was free to communicate without any outside interference.
“How was your day?” she asked, now that she was certain they were alone in their VR environment.
He returned an image of fireworks glittering across the sky.
Explosive.
“Work or home?” Cybele already knew the answer, but asking was part of their ritual.
“Work, always.” An image of a witch’s face, round and green and wearing a pointy black hat, flashed in her visual field for a split-second.
He didn’t say any more, making sure the conversation wasn’t anything his superiors would be likely to discipline him for.
Not this time, anyway.
Mostly, they discussed the work at hand, the things they needed to do to make sure the Rapunzel-320’s microbial deliveries kept the population of Finlay’s planet safe and alive.
But sometimes, they weren’t so circumspect.
Inside the VR unit, their lives outside faded away. They were no longer New Terran and Old Earther, but merely Finlay and Cybele. Two humans.
A man and a woman.
It was those final categories that could get them in trouble.
As often as they could manage it these days, the drop and transfer schedule brought Cybele a
nd her ship around to Finlay’s station during the late-night shift.
Their respective loneliness had gotten the better of them, so they spent every possible moment together in the VR environment.
These days, virtual reality felt more real than Cybele could’ve imagined before this posting.
Chapter 2
The first time they had touched, it had been an accident. As they prepped to do the weekly microbial transfer by threading the pipeline down-hole, Finlay had asked if Cybele knew the source of her ship’s name. Startled by the introduction of a topic that wasn’t directly related to the work at hand, Cybele had spun to face him in VR, her hand slinging sideways and bumping his. He had clasped her wrist to steady her, and the unexpected contact of their VR-glove-enhanced hands had sent a shiver up her arm and down her spine.
She would have been embarrassed about the slight gasp that escaped her, if not for the fact that Finlay had frozen entirely, his avatar’s eyes wide as he watched her. When he finally let go of her arm, his fingers trailed lightly along it as he took his hand away. Even in VR, the intensity of the way his gaze met hers communicated something important.
“Thanks,” she muttered shakily. Her voice gathered strength as she turned back to the task they needed to complete. “No. I don’t know what Rapunzel-320 references.”
“I’m not certain about the number, but Rapunzel is an old Earth fairy tale.”
“So, a princess goes to a ball and ends up married to a handsome prince?” Cybele shook her head and rolled her eyes.
“More along the lines of a princess is trapped in the tall tower by an evil witch. The prince comes to save her, but the witch figures out he’s been visiting, and kicks Rapunzel out of her home.”
“What happens to the prince?”
“The evil which waits for him in the tower. He thinks he’s going to visit Rapunzel, but when he gets to the top, he comes face-to-face with the witch. In a fit of rage, she throws him to the bottom of the tower, where he lands on the bushes at the base. Blinded, he winds up wandering the forest alone for years.” Finlay leaned over to check one of the gauges measuring the pipe’s descent.
“That’s horrible. I thought fairy tales had happy endings.” By this point, Cybele had stopped working entirely and was listening in fascination.
“This one does, too, eventually. By happy accident, the prince stumbles across Rapunzel, where she has been living since she was banished. Her tears of joy at seeing him hit his eyes, and his sight is miraculously returned.”
“And they live happily ever after?”
Finlay shrugged. “That’s the traditional assumption, right?”
Cybele frowned. “I don’t buy it. I think that ending was tacked on later to make a terrible story seem to turn out okay.”
“Maybe so.” With a laugh, Finlay went back to checking gauges and noting pressure numbers in the log he pulled up into the VR environment.
“Wait a minute,” Cybele said. “What is the association, exactly? Why would they name my ship Rapunzel?”
“Oh, didn’t I say? The tower that the evil witch locked Rapunzel in had no door—only a window. To get in and out, the witch climbed up Rapunzel’s long, long hair. When she arrived at the base of the tower, she would call out ‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.’ I assume whoever named your ship thought it was funny.”
* * *
When they were apart, Cybele most often remembered their relatively few romantic interludes. There were also many other, less romantic moments—but moments of intimacy, nonetheless—that popped into her memory over the course of a normal day. They gave no warning, these memories, but they arrived like spirits sent to haunt her, rendering her motionless as they sapped her life-force.
Their unrelenting brightness, a dazzle of remembered love, reflected on her and left her unable to function in the knowledge of their impermanence. All too often, the grief of the memories’ withdrawal almost sent her crashing to her knees as she ghosted through the outer corridor that encircled her home.
She thought of him in scenes, everything about their relationship cut up in her memory and distributed across the landscape of her mind in carefully doled-out dollops of joy, like bright spots of flowers against a vast field of otherwise undifferentiated green.
Her memories of the times in between seeing him were entirely white—the sterile, never-ending corridors of her ship, orbiting Old Earth like a solitary, tiny moon.
* * *
But they could never see each other. Not in person. Cybele’s ship could cleanse his water supply, infuse it with the microbes she grew on board—the ones that the population below needed to survive, but were unable to produce or maintain on their own because the Gotha plague had wiped them out—but nothing could give Cybele and Finlay immunity to one another.
That was their governments’ official position, anyway.
That knowledge had also become the hell of her existence here, the reason she both dreaded and longed for her return home. The thought of ending her tour and heading home made her stomach ache with misery.
Never to speak to him again. Never to send another VR image.
To be a memory four years gone for him when she awoke back on New Terra, the anguish of leaving him still fresh in her heart.
She wasn’t sure which hurt more: the knowledge that he’d be over her before she even started grieving his loss, or the loss itself.
Surely that was at least part of the reason their respective governments forbade even virtual relationships between their citizens.
Not to mention the aching desire to break the quarantine that kept them separate. Cybele was certain she could find a way to protect them from infecting one another. She worked on it in the shipboard lab between duty rotations. She’d gone through a whole battery of psychological tests before she shipped out, most of them designed to make sure she could withstand the isolation of the Old Earth duty.
She’d passed the simulated tests.
They didn’t come close to the reality.
In the lab, she hummed to herself as she ran yet another simulation. The tiny microbes, their images enlarged thousands of times their normal size, danced across the table in front of her. They swirled together and Cybele’s breath caught in her chest. She clasped her hands under her chin, muttering “Good, good. Keep going.” Her shoulders slumped and her breath blew out of her and a half as the bugs died off in waves of shuddering discoloration.
“Dammit. Another try gone.” She stripped off the VR visor and gloves and rubbed her eyes.
It was a foolish pursuit. She knew it. She wasn’t a scientist.
Still, she hoped.
Finlay had never suggested that he should come back to New Terra with her. Early on, they had fantasized together about finding a new world, one they could escape to together.
Then, they had mapped out a plan.
The plan didn’t require immunity to one another—but their survival might.
A feminine-sounding, computerized voice interrupted her reverie. “Reminder: the time is 1900 hours.”
Shaking her head, Cybele left the lab, waving the lights down and the door closed behind her as she stepped into the corridor that rotated around the outer edge of the ship, bounding her world and creating gravity, all at the same time.
Rapunzel-320 was made up of concentric rings, rotating in specific directions at precise speeds to keep the gravity in the outermost ring consistent with something close to New Terran gravity. Cybele lived almost her entire onboard life in this outer ring. The next ring inward held most of the equipment that allowed her to drop the line to Old Earth and send the life-giving aid to the other planet.
By this point, Cybele knew practically every creak and thump of her ship. She could’ve walked it blindfolded. In fact, someday she might try it, just to break up the monotony.
Instead, she made her way to a viewport screen and called up the last coordinates she’d examined.
“Open communication log, letter
to Finlay.” For a long moment, she stared into the darkness of space, waiting to see the phenomenon again.
There.
Bright lights, flickering in the distance, seemed to float upward, like the depictions of old Earth fireflies flashing in the dark.
Like hope.
Chapter 3
Their first kiss was not an accident.
Up to that point, their conversation had been largely acceptable, if a bit too flirtatious. Still, nothing that directly contravened regulations. And their developing emoticon communication system didn’t seem to interest anyone but them.
One of the oddities of having scaled the VR version of the pipeline down to human proportions was that at least some of the control booth areas were a tight squeeze for two. Normally, this didn’t matter, as only one person was required to run the system. That night, however, Cybele had squeezed into the secondary booth to help troubleshoot an underground section of the pipeline. If they didn’t sort out the system glitches quickly, they would have to retract the pipe, pulling it up far enough to the surface to get to whatever was causing the trouble. It would add hours to the work day.
“It just grinds to a halt every time I try to push it past the 1200-meter mark.” Finlay jabbed at a few control buttons in front of him.
“I’m telling you, the problem’s not mechanical.” Cybele punctuated her own comment by highlighting some of the numbers flowing across Finlay’s ticker-tape-style readouts.
“Well, it’s not computational, either.”
Cybele heaved a sigh and rubbed one virtual hand across her virtual forehead. “Could it be iron oxide buildup again? Already?”
“I don’t think so. We set the nanites to scrub more carefully this time. I don’t think they would have missed enough to cause a problem like this.”
“But we haven’t instructed them to scrub this particular area,” Cybele said, her fingers flying through a series of complicated gyrations as she pulled up the information she needed to double-check her claim. “We should at least try it.”
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