by Scott Rhine
“I was one of the strongest men on Niisham!”
“If any Saurian got his arms around you, he could kill you in a bear hug. Bats are easy to pin that way. We can help you build your arm strength and teach you escapes, but the best defense is not to fall into that trap. Keep them at a distance. Plus, with a staff you can take on multiple opponents at once.”
Menelaus mopped his face. “Perhaps this would be useful.”
****
In the nine days leading up to the next jump to Azure Refuel Station, Reuben beat Menelaus every match. The first injury came when the Bat scored a late hit on Reuben’s jaw.
“I called point,” Herb said, interceding.
“Such a gentle tap to my wrist would not have disabled me.”
Herb grabbed his wrist and twisted until the Bat cried out in pain and dropped his weapon. “Your people have a pressure point here. That’s what he struck. If he had used full force, your arm would be numb all afternoon like it’s going to be now.”
“How? Ouch.”
“Every species has its strengths and weaknesses. You may be fast, but I have better reach and skill. My stepdaughter from a high-g world could bench-press you, so stop trying to show off. You will pull your punches and follow the rules of sparring, or we’ll kick you off this crew. Since your own people don’t want you, I would think twice about that option.”
“You’re biased against me because I offended your mate.”
Herb shook his head. “No. That’s why you hit yourself in the forehead when you bent to pick up your fork, nimrod.” He didn’t go into details, but Roz had the Probability Manipulation talent. People who made her mad tended to have freak accidents. “Give me twenty push-ups while Reuben recovers, and then we’ll keep fighting. You may be freaking fast, but you need some manners if you’re going to stay alive.”
During the push-ups, Reuben said, “Once he masters the basics, I’ve been thinking about switching him to a fencing foil to capitalize on his speed.”
Herb nodded. “I’ve had some experience in that area.”
Menelaus paused for water. “What about Magi? What’s their weakness?”
“No one attacks them,” Reuben said. “Aside from the uplifter reverence factor, they rarely risk themselves in person and then never without overwhelming tech. The only time I’ve ever heard of Magi dying is in a starship crash or from grief at the passing of a mate. The trick is to distract them with other concerns, such as ethical dilemmas. Turtles are similar in many ways. So few of either species are left. Turtles are physically larger, and you can’t damage them once they’re adults. The last species to harm their eggs got kicked out of the Union. As a distraction, you have to threaten them enough to get them to pull back into a defensive ball until you get what you really want. Use their own strength and fears against them. Fight the mind before the body.”
Vaguely stunned by the idea that a mere Goat would have such advice, Menelaus asked, “How did you learn this?”
“From the same Keshmandar book you idolize,” Reuben said.
“A different version?”
“No,” Reuben replied. “You can’t talk about such things directly. You have to know how to interpret the poems.”
“I skipped those as drivel. Who can extract wisdom from ‘Beauty of the morning dew on the spider’s web shimmering in the dawn light’?”
Reuben sighed. “Everyone knows it’s a metaphor.”
“Um … I didn’t,” admitted Herb.
“We’re all trapped by life. The point is to find the beauty in the inevitable and use that to accomplish your aims. Even physically deceased, you can use the momentum of the universe to accomplish your legacy and attain happiness. The only true death is when you no longer have goals.”
For the first time, Menelaus bowed toward Reuben. “You have much to teach me.”
From that session onward, the Bat began to score more often. Each day, he would reread some section of the memoirs and ask for Reuben’s interpretation of an obscure passage. “What about ‘the favorable embrace or none’?”
“Two arms refers to a two-to-one advantage in battle. Favorable means on a ground of your own choosing. If you don’t have both, avoid the conflict. You’ll hurt yourself, and you may do your opponent a disservice as well.”
“Why would that matter?”
“War is political not personal. Your enemy today may be your ally tomorrow. In the Union of Souls, the loss of life is to be avoided at all costs. In space especially, you should never destroy resources.”
Max clapped behind him, startling everyone. No one had seen him appear. “You sound like an ancient Chinese warlord now. Sobriety becomes you.”
“Yeah. It’s not like I stayed loaded because I liked it.”
“What do you mean?” Max asked.
Reuben sighed. “Every time I touch a woman that I … like, I get dumber.”
“Happens to every man around a good-looking woman,” Herb confided.
“No. My power makes the woman smarter. Roz thinks she taps other quantum branches of herself as well as borrowing the processing capacity of my mind. Maybe it’s the foreign-species thing, but I get a huge headache afterward. Booze helps take the edge off.”
Max placed a hand on him. “As ship’s doctor, you should have told me.”
“Why? Do you have a Top Secret drug that inhibits my talent?”
“No.”
“I had it under control. I could sleep through the worst of it after sex. The alcohol kept the residual effects at bay.”
“Except that the alcohol made you want more female contact, which caused more cerebral swelling.”
Reuben closed his eyes at the memory of Ivy and why he wanted her. “I’m done for today. We need to batten down the hatches and climb into stasis.”
Max nodded and wandered off.
Menelaus looked awed at the exchange. “Could you teach me to seduce Human women? My own kind will be few and far between.”
“Kid, in that area, my kung fu is no good,” Reuben said. “The best I can offer is a cold shower.”
Chapter 10 – Attack
After the jump to Azure, Reuben awoke to flashing lights and an unpleasantly warm room. “Minder, what’s wrong?” When the AI failed to answer, Reuben cursed and unstrapped. Tapping his badge, he said, “Max?”
“Busy,” was his mentor’s one-word reply.
“Open the door to the astrogation chamber, and I can help.”
A muffled thump shook the ship, and the lights turned red. A minute later, the door to Echo’s mirrored room swished open. Max leaned over a console, as calm as someone planning a chess move. “I need help extinguishing a fire.”
Reuben looked at the status map in horror. Several engines were gone, and the outer-ring corridor was on fire. The cargo areas and ecosystems were sealed off, but the filtration systems would be overloaded soon. “Open it to vacuum.”
“Can’t. Too close to the sun.”
“Um … seal all the internal hatches, and shut off the power while I remember the symbol for the fire-suppression system.” We did reconnect it during the repairs, right?
Max punched a few buttons. “Way ahead of you there. We already shunted grav power to the engines.”
Reuben reached around Max to activate the proper system. The video screen to the right filled with smoke.
“I tried that button before, and nothing happened,” Max insisted.
“But you didn’t confirm that all the people were out first. Magi safety feature.” Reuben glanced over at the pilot standing by her own console.
Roz’s head darted right, and her hair floated around her as if she were in a swimming pool. Echo stood back-to-back with her, providing her with almost 360 degrees of vision. Together, the women resembled a statue of some Roman goddess. Roz moved her arms across virtual controls only she could see, her hands dancing to music only she could hear.
The tactical display showed them corkscrewing toward the sun. “Two missiles
are chasing us,” Reuben said.
“Used to be ten,” Max said with pride. “My lady knows how to shake it. Only one hostile grazed us. It wasn’t even a nuke.”
The Icarus fields would have protected them from a nuclear weapon. The high explosives were used first to poke a hole in that shield. Nukes would be part of the next volley. “What happened to the beam-projector defense system?”
Max pointed to another failure. “That’s what overheated to cause the fire. Worked great while it lasted, though.”
“Old Grady was frilling right about the wiring.”
“That’s when Roz got the idea to use the gravity well and solar flares to our advantage.”
Reuben wiped perspiration off his forehead. “Who’s shooting at us?”
“Before the last explosion took out our radio antenna, we were informed that we’re pirates under death sentence for murder.”
“On what grounds?”
“Our drive signature matched the perpetrators of the Salizar B massacre.”
Massacre? The Bankers were spreading lies again. Their ship’s fingerprint must have been recorded by the very defense system Reuben had stolen. This was rather like the thieves breaking the security camera without destroying the memory cube attached. The Bankers must know about the existence of the faster star drive. “Tell Echo to get us the hell out of here.”
Echo spoke softly. “Tell me yourself, Black Ram.”
“Make the next hop to Laurelin. I know you have it planned out already.” Reuben walked over to the Magi, wanting to shake sense into her. “It’s the first rule of warfare: flee and deceive when outmatched. The people watching the sensors will report us killed.”
Max shook his head. “Suicide either way. Laurelin’s the private system of one of the richest companies in the galaxy. If we don’t warn them we’re coming, the automated systems at the arrival nexus will blow us to bits.”
They couldn’t thaw Ivy to make the call to her sisters, or she might not finish the journey alive. Without an ansible or radio, they had no conventional options. Reuben opted for unconventional. “So show up in orbit around the forest moon with all external engines dark.”
“I can’t recompute the jump vector to the necessary degree of accuracy before the next missile hits.” The Magi neutral was pale and trembling, her wavy hair graying in places.
“Close enough is good enough, uplifter. We don’t want your secret to die here.” Taking a risk, Reuben gripped her hand. He had served her for almost two years and risked his life to free her. She was married to his two best friends in the world, which meant he loved Echo by extension. He willed his power to work.
The sudden Collective Unconscious link to the Magi was like licking a Taser. This neutral’s mind was incredibly powerful. For a moment their world views touched. He saw Roz at the center of a glowing, red web, pulling on threads to avoid flares and missiles alike. However, the threads were more helix-shaped than lines. Had she always been this beautiful?
The backlash knocked him onto his butt. The headache that followed reminded Reuben of the only time he had ever tried to ice skate, complete with the nosebleed. The sharp stab behind his right eye robbed him of breath as he put a handkerchief to his face.
Then Echo’s eyes became star sapphires as inspiration struck. She floated over to the nav console. For a moment, her hair turned all white. “Brace for the subbasement.”
The room spun. He saw faint images of two other Magi standing, one by each door of the room like guardian angels. Is this how Echo sees things, or is this the new jump drive’s side effect?
Max’s skin seemed darker, almost like a mask for samurai armor. Only his eyes showed the kindness within. The doctor dragged Reuben into the stasis chamber over a shoulder. “Sorry about her psi bolts. I know you were trying to save us, but Echo doesn’t like men of any species touching her.”
Reuben gazed at the motionless Ivy through the window. He felt tenderness emanate from her as she whispered, “Heal your people.”
This has to be a hallucination.
A swarm of Maxes slammed him into the pod, murmuring soothing platitudes. His hands were a blur as he snapped the harness and applied a monitor. After he pushed the button, Max vanished.
Darkness fell in the room where time was not supposed to apply. Perhaps the power had flickered. He prayed it wasn’t death, not because he was afraid to die but because he didn’t want to be alone on this side of the veil, too.
Chapter 11 – Not Out of the Elvish Woods Yet
Light stung Reuben’s slotted eyes from a penlight as Max checked him for damage. “Sorry, buddy. Another malfunction, probably due to the fire. Ironically, that repair is third in your queue behind rewiring our defenses and rebalancing the engines. Oh, and the radio. Your readings look normal. How do you feel?”
“Like I just rode a rollercoaster standing up and hit my head on a Stay Seated sign.”
Max nodded. “You’re lucky. I had to watch the whole ride from the front seat.”
“I can patch the radio receiver in the loading bay into the main board, but we can’t broadcast without an antenna.”
“Go. We need to know how long we have before the locals react. We’ll keep the intercoms open in case you run into problems.” Max returned to the astrogation chamber.
As Reuben rode up in the elevator, he heard Roz over his badge. “We’re shadowing an asteroid on thrusters only. Max tells us the head of the Llewellyn family can sense Icarus drives at astronomical distances.”
Run silent, run deep, just like the submarine battles with the Phibs. “How much did we miss the goal by?”
“Not certain. I’m relying on passive gravity sensors for now. The system only has one habitable moon but a lot of debris.” Terraforming the system should have been too expensive for a colony to pay back, yet the company had developed the location as a retirement home for its founding families. “Several telescopes were damaged or misaligned.”
Reuben sighed. “Right. I can suit up and fix that problem next.”
Despite the many unknowns, Roz seemed more relaxed. “On the bright side, this hop was much shorter. We have almost a quarter of a tank left to work with.”
Reuben stopped at the first-aid station on the cargo level to grab a whole roll of pain patches. He plastered one behind each ear and a third between his eyes. He wanted a drink bad but couldn’t afford the reduced reaction times. To make up for the stop, he bounced, pushing off alternating walls until he reached the locker room by the shuttle bay.
He pulled on his vac suit in record time but double-checked the seals because the rest of the crew might die if he slipped up. There would certainly be no one to come rescue him because the only person qualified, Roz, couldn’t leave the pilot’s chair.
While he waited in the decompression chamber, Reuben asked, “Theoretically, how far could we get if we dipped into the subbasement again and sort of drifted with the flow?”
Echo replied, “Nowhere. We’d probably pop back out again at the same place.”
“Interesting. We’d sort of blink out of existence? For how long?”
“The answer would take a week to extrapolate. At a cost of eight million credits in fuel, why would we want to?” asked Echo.
“When all you have is a hammer, you look for creative ways to pound.” The light in the cramped room turned green. Reuben opened the door to the shuttle bay, closing it behind him. “We could dodge missiles that way in a pinch.”
“Perhaps. I’ll get back to you on that. The mass of the ship is problematic for any rapid action in higher dimensions.”
While Reuben tore the maintenance covers off the ship-to-shuttle comm system, Roz warmed to the discussion. “Hmm. That trick could come in handy. Would a purely subbasement ship need the reactor and Icarus drives?”
Echo replied, “No. The device in the Mnamnabo system used the hydrogen fuel from the sun itself. All we really need is a place away from the gravity well and enough power charged in the quant
um capacitors for the jump.”
Reuben connected jumper cables from the small shuttle-bay receiver to the feed from the disconnected hull antenna. After testing the results, he carried his gear over to the external airlock. As there was no air pressure in the shuttle bay, it opened for him immediately.
Roz continued to muse aloud. “I think the gravity-well restriction is bogus. I mean, we hopped near a sun, and the Xerxes weapon did also.”
Opening the exterior door, Reuben did a quick scan for space debris and radiation. Finding nothing unusual, he stepped into the void. He clipped his safety line on reflexively as he scanned the sky. The iron-latticed supports for the Icarus drives were undamaged on this side of the sphere. His naked eyes couldn’t see more than the usual constellations and the local sun, but the patterns looked comfortingly similar to home.
Max interrupted. “You’re saying people could jump to other worlds from a planet’s surface?”
A burst of static cut through Reuben’s headphones. Suddenly, he was isolated from the crew, physically as well as electronically. If something went wrong, the air would give out long before cold or starvation killed him.
An image of Echo appeared before him—mental, not a hologram. “Why can I see you?”
“Anyone with the Quantum Computing ability can see out-of-body scouts. Even those who haven’t manifested their talent are attuned to those they’ve touched.”
He smiled. “So I do have the Black Ram talent. Could you keep this between us?”
“You violated me in a very personal way.” Echo’s face seemed sterner than a university librarian. “I’ll need to spend most of our stay here in my medical pod decontaminating.”
Reuben knelt on the hull and tried to emanate remorse. “Forgive me. I was trying to save us all.”
“Speak nothing of what you saw in my mind or anything my beloved has told you about the star drive.”
They’d put me in a psych ward. He could disappear right now, and no one else would know. Oddly, the implication angered him. “Or what? You kill me?”
