When she dropped down to sit next to the giant pipe leading into the ground, Cybele was able to pluck a virtual piece of grass from the apparent ground beneath her and strip it into several long, green, stringy bits. “Yeah, I could take my discharge and go. I’d be fine for the rest of my life. At least, I’d be taken care of. But I would be bored senseless.”
“Even more bored than you are on this duty?”
She cut her eyes toward him—or toward his avatar, anyway. “This part of the duty isn’t boring at all.”
Back in his own office, Finlay had called up a copy of their emoticon language. In the virtual reality, he seemed to sketch in the air, calling forth the image of the stylized, blushing face, followed by a face that blew kisses and the shapes of hearts.
Cybele laughed. “Seriously, I’m not sure I could ever be happy staying on New Terra. Not for good. I want to go home, of course, but not to stay.”
“That’s the whole reason to become a pilot, isn’t it?” Finlay turned on his side and stretched out, resting his head on his arms and joining Cybele in her grass-picking. “Even here in Old Earth, the people who train as pilots are always trying to go higher, faster, farther.”
“I think so,” Cybele said.
“What would it take to run away together? To go farther than anyone else ever has?” Finlay shifted the VR environment to a stellar view and pulled up a map of the galaxy.
That was when they chose a habitable planet to share.
* * *
“Are you sure we could see each other safely?” Cybele had asked him late one night as they waited for the system to finish working. With everything running smoothly, they had hours before they’d be required to do any more work, and their talk turned again to escaping the limitations on their relationship.
“I’m not entirely certain of anything,” he said. “But I don’t care. I want to be with you. We can figure out how to stay together. New Terra is four years’ travel away, and Old Earth doesn’t have any reliable long-range spaceships. We could take off.”
“What about the people on your planet?” Cybele was tempted to run away with him, but there was nothing she could do to protect the population that would leave behind. “What about the weekly drops?” she asked.
“Your replacement is due to be here in the less than two months. The Old Earthers would survive just fine—water rationing might get a little tight, but no worse than we’ve had before.”
“We just…go?” Cybele’s breathless question left him smiling down at her.
“Yes,” he said. “There’s nothing stopping us, except our own worries.”
Cybele’s breath caught in her chest. To simply leave, to run away with this man she had fallen in love with virtually, to escape with him before she ever knew for certain if she could love him out in the real world.
The idea was…
Breathtaking.
Finlay reached over and threaded his fingers through hers. The VR receptors transmitted the warmth of human touch to her as if they were actually in the same place.
Using the contact point to pull her closer to him, Finlay whispered, “I want to hold you in my arms. Make love to you. Bury myself inside you.”
His words sent spikes of desire racing through her. “Me too,” she rasped, her voice hoarse with wanting him. “I want that too.”
Chapter 8
Now he stood outside the airlock, and Cybele’s hands shook as she reached up to splay her fingers, matching them against his palm on the window. She keyed on the microphone to allow them to speak to one another. “Why are you here?”
“I’m not as good a program hacker as I thought I was.”
“What does that mean?” Cybele rubbed her forehead with the fingers of her other hand.
“My division started a huge audit last week. They found the scrubbed VR sessions.”
Cybele’s breath came out in a low, long whistle. “Did they trace it back to you?”
“Not yet,” Finlay said with a shrug that looked too contrived. “But they brought in specialists to begin clarifying the avatars’ images. It’s only a matter of time.” He huffed out a little laugh as he glanced around at his shuttle, behind him. “Actually, I’m pretty sure they realize it was me at this point, whether they finished bringing up the image or not.”
His mouth tightened as if he didn’t want to say the next words, but he forced himself to speak. “They won’t stop until they have evidence that it was me. They’ll want to prosecute me for both offenses—stealing the shuttle and loving you. There only five of us who do that job, maybe another ten or twelve technicians who have access to the system. They’re actively trying to determine whether it was you and one of the techs, or two technicians, or if a tech was making use of the system downtime to play with a friend.”
“What do you want me to do?” Cybele’s voice was low and little urgent.
Finlay closed his eyes for a long moment, then stared intently at her when he finally answered. “I want to go, far away from here. Anywhere, as long as it’s with you.”
“Finlay, they can’t touch me. I’m not subject to their rules—not really. I don’t answer to them.”
“But you do answer to the New Terran Council.”
In that moment, Cybele knew. Her decision was made for her, long before he ever actually showed up. She would always go with him.
She keyed open the hatch lock, listening for the slight hiss of air pressure equalizing as she swung it wide and gestured for him to enter. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
* * *
After Finlay had stripped off the spacesuit and stowed it in the terminal D storage space, Cybele gave him a quick tour of the Rapunzel-320, suddenly aware of every flaw in the ship she had called home for almost 2 years now. He didn’t seem to notice those imperfections, however, focused as he was on the need to deal with the repercussions of his defection.
She couldn’t help but revel in his actual, physical presence.
He was everything she had expected him to be. There were subtle differences, of course, ways that his own self-perception had influenced the computer’s interaction with his brain scan to create the avatar—but it was still clearly and identifiably her Finlay. He stood so tall that she barely reached his chest, though she wasn’t short herself. His broad shoulders made him seem even bigger than he actually was.
He interrupted her examination, bringing her back to the issues of the present moment.
“They’ll almost certainly send someone after me. Someone to bring me back, force me to stand trial.”
“They won’t catch us.” Cybele nodded decisively. “Old Earth’s spaceflight capabilities are rudimentary, at best. Your world simply hasn’t kept up—there’s been no need to.” She paused in their circuit around the outer corridor door and stared at him intently. “Which shuttle did you take?”
“The best we had at our facility. But it’s not the best on the planet. If they were tracking me—and I think we have to assume they were—then they’re currently gearing up to follow me up here.”
“Then we’re out of time.” Without another word, she spun on her heel and headed toward the pilot’s cockpit room. Finlay followed her, as perfectly in tune with her intentions as he had grown to be in their work together in the virtual reality simulation of his real world.
Once there, she pulled on her VR headset and gloves and tossed an extra set to Finlay. “You have anything in that shuttle you need to retrieve before we leave?”
A pained expression crossed his face, but he shook his head. “No. I assume your ship can support both of us?”
“Absolutely.” Cybele flipped down the visor and began spooling up the ship’s drive.
The VR simulation of the ship’s interior workings was gorgeous. A field of black velvet as far as the eye could see, with neon sparks and stars trailing lights behind them. Finlay appeared beside her as a column of burning blue light shooting up into infinity.
“Do you need me to do
anything?” His voice echoed through the spaceflight nightscape, but he sounded as he always did, and Cybele’s heart thumped harder at the realization that he was with her, for real, forever.
“Just be with me.” Her fingers flashed over the controls in front of her, appearing in the VR simulation is a cascade of light and sound, weaving together to create a Symphony of escape.
With a crash of cymbals, Cybele blew the shuttle docked at terminal D away from the Rapunzel-320. It spun away from Old Earth, and into infinity, drifting aimlessly. Cybele nodded in satisfaction. The Old Earther government would have to decide whether to send its fastest ship to retrieve the space shuttle, or to try to run down the Rapunzel-320 and take back their wayward technician.
Inside the VR, the spinning ship showed as a spiral of orange-gold fire trailing away to their left.
“Does it matter where we go?”
She could hear the smile in Finlay’s voice. “I think we should check out our chosen planet.”
With a few more chiming notes dancing as lights through the black-fabric sky in front of them, Cybele set the Rapunzel-320’s course. Away from New Terra. Away from Old Earth. Toward the planet she’d been wanting to explore—the one currently cloaked by floating lights. The surge of the Rapunzel-320’s engines kicking in such a thrill of excitement through Cybele’s body, and she found herself wanting to share the moment with Finlay in the actual ship, not in the VR simulation.
Setting her spaceship on autopilot, Cybele stripped off the visor and gloves and turned to find Finlay replacing his equipment in the storage cube she’d taken it from when she gave it to him.
Her heart beat faster at his nearness, at the thought of the inherent physicality of his presence. She found herself feeling more shy than she had since the night of their first kiss in the VR program.
With one hand, she reached up and brushed his dark, soft hair away from his forehead. The intensity of its texture against her skin sent shocks of awareness through her fingertips and up her arms. Virtual reality technology was good, but ultimately, it couldn’t replicate the finer points of sensation, not even through a full-body VR suit.
The feel of his hair against her hand was nothing compared to his touch trailing down her cheek, along the side of her neck, and brushing lightly to her shoulder.
When he followed his fingers with his lips, Cybele’s knees went weak. He caught her around the waist and drew her body up against his, making sure with every point of contact that she felt the very here-ness of his entire corporeal being.
Her soft sigh as he brought his lips down to hers brought a smile to his face, and Cybele was certain she could feel the body heat between them growing warmer by the millisecond.
“Is there bunk on this boat big enough for two?” Finlay’s words fluttered down into the pit of Cybele’s stomach, and she could do little more than nod.
“Show me,” he rasped.
So she did.
Chapter 9
At first, they thought they had escaped cleanly.
His boss was the one who had found them out.
Finlay had always refused to use her name—he said she didn’t deserve it.
He called her The Witch, and his only words about her were couched in the language of absence.
The Witch didn’t show up today. The Witch doesn’t care if everyone around her dies. The Witch has never bothered to be in the VR room.
And yet everything of his world reflected her presence, as well. The Witch determined his schedule. The Witch’s absence allowed him the time to change the records so that he could see Cybele.
And Cybele’s direct questions about The Witch were answered with evasions, evasions that Cybele decided to accept at face value.
It was perhaps inevitable that she was the one to discover his malfeasance.
The first Cybele knew of The Witch first-hand, the messages she sent in pursuit of Finlay after he had escaped, served only to reinforce Finlay’s descriptions of her as determined, angry, freakishly relentless.
Her voice was harsh over the communications device.
“… Must return to Old Earth. He has violated everything that our society stands for. All that is moral and decent must be revenged upon him.”
That was what Cybele heard, anyway. Even though the words might actually be more formal: “… must return to Old Earth for full decontamination and reintegration into Old Earther society. The Rapunzel-320 will return to New Terra as originally ordered.”
In reality, The Witch sounded more cold, more distant than the undertone of anger that Cybele associated with her—and perhaps even ascribed to her.
Swiping in the command to lower the communications arrays volume, Cybele turned to Finlay. “She says they simply want to put you in some kind of decontamination. What does that really mean?”
Finlay ran his fingers through his thick, dark hair, shaking his head. “I’m not entirely certain, but I’m sure it’s nothing good.”
“I never studied your penal system,” Cybele said, tilting her head to one side. “Probably because I assumed it would never apply to me or any work I did on Old Earth.”
“The Witch isn’t lying. They would integrate me back into society. Eventually.”
“And until then?” Cybele’s stomach sank at the sight of how Finlay’s face tightened at the question.
“Before reintegration, there would probably be some kind of memory wipe.”
Horror shot through Cybele, and her hands went cold and numb. “How much of a memory wipe?”
Finlay shook his head. “It’s still a relatively new technology. More blunt force than precision surgery.”
“Then how do they pinpoint what they want to eliminate?”
“They don’t.”
At that, Cybele’s stomach heaved, and it was all she could do to keep down the hydroponically grown salad she had served them earlier. With a shudder, she keyed off the communications array and turned away from The Witch and her message.
“She has no power over us,” she said.
* * *
Cybele was wrong, of course.
Old Earth might not have ships that could match New Terra’s, but what it lacked in space travel ability, it made up for in weaponry. Weaponry that it had hidden from its New Terran allies, contravening every alliance treaty the two worlds ever agreed to.
Weaponry that had been designed specifically to counter any offensive maneuvers a ship sent by New Terra might take against its mother planet.
“Of course,” Cybele muttered to herself as her hands flashed through the air in front of her, calling up control panels in the limited VR environment she had set up to deal with this latest threat.
“How can I help?” Finlay asked, pulling the second VR set out of that storage unit.
“Grab the footage of the ship… probe… missile? Whatever the hell they sent after us.” She waited until he joined her in the VR environment, then slid part of the control board in the air in front of her so that floated in front of him instead.
“Got it.” As ever, Finlay’s hands moved faster across the board than she might have expected from someone as enormous as he was. For just a brief second, she allowed herself to admire him, then turned back to the work at hand.
“I’m tracing their trajectory,” she said. “If I’m even close to being right about their firing capabilities, we have a good 12 to 15 hours before they catch up with us enough to take a shot. If they miss, it could take them another hour to recalibrate and catch up again.”
Finlay shook his head. “I think we had better assume that they’re at least twice as fast as we expect.”
Cybele shot him a sharp glance. “You know something you’re not telling me?”
“Nothing definite—only rumors. Whatever this is, they kept it pretty tightly under wraps. I mean, everyone in the department knew there was something being engineered—something they didn’t want anyone else to know about.”
“You mean they didn’t want me to know abo
ut it?”
“You, New Terra, me, their own allies. I think whatever this is, it’s definitely paranoid.” In all of this, his hands had not quit flashing across the control board, until now. For a moment, Cybele assumed that Finlay had simply come to the end of a code line, or reached a natural stopping point in the process he was completing.
Then she realized he was actually frozen in place. “What is it?” Dread laced her voice, making it heavy and dark, full of the apprehension she felt.
“Come look,” Finlay rasped.
With a swipe of her finger, Cybele joined Finlay in his readout space. In front of them floated a 3-D rendering of the ship that chased them.
The Rapunzel-320’s aft cameras had caught a complete scan.
The design was like nothing she had seen before.
Cybele had lived most of her life around spaceships, had lived on the Rapunzel-320 for two years, and had trained on one much like it for a year before she had ever left New Terra. She knew the structure of spaceships. By process of elimination, she was able to figure out what some parts of the structure she was looking at might do.
“This,” she said, pointing at various portions of the image, “and this, and this, and this. Those are engines, I think. These first two are standard, the kind that would get a ship out of orbit, or possibly—probably, given the fact that I didn’t see this anywhere in orbit around Old Earth—off planet, as well.”
“What’s the last one?” Finlay asked.
Cybele started to shrug but paused. “I think…” She hesitated to even say it. “It might be some kind of faster-than-light drive.”
“It doesn’t look like any kind of FTL drive design I’ve ever seen,” Finlay replied, his doubt echoing through his voice.
“Me, either. But it’s clearly some kind of propulsion device, and because it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen, I think it must be something new—some… I don’t know. It must represent some new thinking about space travel.”
Spectral Velocity Page 4
