Interim: On the run from the Galactic FTL Police

by P. K. Lentz

  “Then we’ll die some other way,” Zerouali said. “Some other time.”

  “How do you want to die?”

  “I don’t.”

  “I know, but when it comes, how would you like it to be?”

  Zerouali’s bare shoulders, chill with dried sweat, rubbed Kearn’s flesh in a shrug. “I haven’t stopped running long enough to know.”

  “When Lisset died, she only didn’t want to be alone,” Kearn said. “I used to think that someday I’d just run out of luck and expire in hibe, like you thought I already had. But I’m not so sure anymore.”

  Suddenly it was Zerouali’s turn to prod at the other’s defenses. “Has the legendary Captain Kearn become that child again?” she taunted. “Tugging at his parents’ sleeves and begging for a home?”

  The words cut close, but Kearn did not begrudge the woman for having spoken them. He stared instead into the blackness above, considering the words and the soft flesh against his, the gentle heartbeat not his own, the flutter of her breath on his neck.

  Mind and body, within and without, thought and sensation, it struck Kearn then, all stood distinctly at odds. When had he ever had a post-coital conversation like this one? The answer was simple enough. Never.

  But Zerouali’s accusation wasn’t quite right. No, he hadn’t reverted to childhood. Quite the contrary: he’d finally grown up.

  “We should make a pledge to each other,” Kearn said at length. “A century from now, wherever we are, we’ll both have stopped running.”

  After a moment’s thought, Zerouali nodded.

  “Good.” Kearn angled his head to meet the woman’s eyes. “Seal it with another round?”

  Zerouali’s lips twisted in a smirk, then twisted even more when she caught Kearn’s gaze wandering well below her face.

  “You’re single-minded, aren’t you?” she said.

  “More than you know.”

  At that, Zerouali’s body tensed subtly against Kearn’s--suggesting that she sensed the veiled meaning in his careless remark. There was no fooling her. But she voiced no objection.

  “Believe it or not,” she said instead, “I didn’t come here to fuck.”

  The crude spacer verb Zerouali had chosen to describe what they’d just done was perhaps intended to deliver a subtle message of her own, a warning and rebuff.

  She said, “Ilias had something urgent to tell you when you refused his comms.”

  “Can’t be too urgent if it’s slipped your mind this long.”

  “It didn’t slip my mind.”

  “Well, then I’m flattered.”

  “You want to hear it or not?”

  “Yes, sorry.”

  “Lady’s translight core is dead.”

  “Dead?” Kearn sat bolt upright, forcing Zerouali to roll off of him and prop her head on one elbow.

  “Dead,” she repeated calmly. “Just like its maker.”

  Kearn’s mind had already drawn that connection. “I suppose it’s gone for good then,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t ‘suppose’ anything.”

  With a sigh, Kearn glanced around him, seeking out his clothes. “I should get out there and be a captain again.”

  Zerouali reached for her own strewn clothing. “Then my work here is done.”

  They dressed in silence. Finishing, they stood at arm’s length on the floor-wide display, gazing solemnly down upon Ona. Many people had died down there, yet Kearn’s thoughts were selfishly on just one of them.

  Zerouali said suddenly, “She didn’t like me very much.”

  The comment took Kearn by surprise. “It was nothing personal,” he answered. “She didn’t like anyone.”

  “She might have survived, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Then we should speak of her in the present tense.”

  Kearn nodded.

  “When you make plans to search groundside,” Zerouali offered, “be sure I’m included.”

  “I will. Thank you.”

  Kearn tore his eyes away from Ona and shared one last glance with Zerouali before heading to the exit. When she did not move to accompany him, Kearn paused.

  “I’d like to stay here for a bit,” she explained. “You don’t need me in your way.”

  “You wouldn’t be,” Kearn assured her. “But it’s your choice.” He resumed his exit, but stopped again at the hatch. “I recorded most of Lisset’s final words on my comms. They’re not quite neurilace, but useful nonetheless. I’ll prep a copy for you.”

  From across the chamber, too deep in shadow to read, Zerouali’s eyes met his. “I’d appreciate it, Captain,” she said.

  With that somewhat stilted exchange, and nothing more, they parted.

  Kearn was halfway to the lift when it dawned on him what Zerouali had just done. The spacer tongue contained at least eight words for ‘captain.’ She’d used the most intimate and familiar of them, the one Ilias and Thorien used, suggestive of equals whose fates were intertwined.

  Permitting himself a quick half-smile, Kearn proceeded to the radial lift. He commed the bridge and gave a rushed apology for his antisocial behavior before moving on to business.

  “Any word from our team groundside?” he asked.

  The crewman on duty, Welch, delivered the disappointing but not unexpected reply. “No, sir.”

  “Keep trying, and prepare to break orbit for Ona’s fuel platform. Its crew may have no idea yet what’s happened. We’ll deliver the bad news and offer them a ride in exchange for fuel. Once we’re full, we come back and start the search for Aprile, assuming we haven’t heard from her first.”

  “Aye, sir,” Welch replied. “There was a transmission received while you were unavailable.”

  At Kearn’s acknowledgment the recording issued forth over his comm.

  Civilian freighter in Ona orbit, this is Ona Commissioner, Interim Instruction & Guidance Directorate. Against my personal recommendation, eight among my staff have elected to seek evacuation aboard your vessel. I therefore request that you grant them passage. I remind you that you are bound by Interim Universal Spacing Law to comply if you are able. We await response including details of the transfer. Our station’s emergency beacon has been activated.

  “What’s our reply, Captain?” Welch asked.

  Kearn sighed. “Much as I hate to let the likes of them set foot on Lady, I suppose we ought to agree. But let’s refuel first and wait for word from Whisper. Maybe Sallat can take them. I’d rather let the Interim take care of its own.

  “However,” Kearn added, “when and if we do take them aboard--and please quote this precisely in our reply--if one of them is armed with so much as a fork, the whole lot will suck vacuum. Keep me posted. Kearn out.”

  “Just one more thing, sir,” Welch came back. “Ilias has something to tell you. I don’t know what it is.”

  Of course, this would be the message Zerouali had already delivered. Nonetheless, Kearn commed the engineer.

  “I’m told our translight days are over,” Kearn said to Ilias when they were connected, preempting the man’s announcement.

  “At least for now,” Ilias returned. “Core’s gone cold. No output on any frequency.”

  “Use it to decorate your quarters,” Kearn returned. “Or space it if you like. It’s never coming back. The only thing yet to be seen is whether Fleet’s cores have done the same.”

  “I won’t even bother to ask how you know that.”

  “Wise choice. Kearn out.”

  Thirty minutes later, Ona’s antimatter platform rose over the curved horizon of the swirling gas giant. Lady began broadcasting all manner of friendly greetings in machine-translated Onari.

  The reply came in a different language entirely.

  “We were wondering when you’d show, Maseilya.”

  “Fyat?” Kearn blurted aloud, then remembered himself and commenced recording for return transmission. “Fyat,” he said urgently. “Ona’s surface has been cleansed. What is your status? Is Aprile
with you?”

  Seconds later Fyat’s never-welcome voice returned with welcome news. “Affirmative,” he reported. “She is alive and undamaged. We have twenty-three captives, several wounded. Another fifteen are dead. The station is ours. Approach for refuel.”

  Kearn hardly heard any of this beyond the news of his navigator’s well being. “Acknowledged,” he said anyway.

  Were it not for zero grav on the bridge, Kearn might have collapsed. He rubbed his eyes to stave off stinging tears. Losing Aprile on the now utterly pointless Ona mission would have weighed on him the rest of his days--and just when his burden over Serenity had begun to ease.

  Ren. She’d scarcely crossed his mind of late. Now, just as during those centuries of her captivity, her presence lurked in the corners of his mind, ready to shame him when he bothered to notice it.

  She carried his daughter. That thought gave Kearn pause. It was really only his genetic material. Nothing special, nothing magic. Given all the worlds he’d visited and all the women he’d been with down the centuries, the mere statistics of contraceptive failure favored the likelihood of his genes being out there somewhere already. Great-great-grandchildren of his could have been snuffed out in Fleet’s extermination campaign.

  But that was in another life, one now behind him. In this life, Ren--like all aboard Lady--would face hard decisions upon emerging from hibe into a new reality. Decisions on how to live, where to live. Whether to live.

  Maybe this child could help make the new universe a better place. Maybe even her bastard father could help, too.

  “Captain, scanners pick up what looks like a Fleet warship inbound, ETA six-point-five hours.”

  This report from the crewman currently sharing the bridge with him dragged Kearn’s mind out of the future and past, into the present.

  “It’s Whisper of Death.”

  Kearn transmitted a standard greeting. Minutes later he received a reply.

  “I wonder what you’re still doing here, Kearn,” Sallat sent back. “Hunter in the Dark slipped in-system hours ago and survived our ambush. During the battle they managed to launch warheads at Ona, which sadly seem to have struck home.

  “Our battle with them ended prematurely with the failure of our translight core. We have six dead from the sudden loss of grav. Since then we’ve had no sign of Hunter, although last we knew she was undamaged. If she does reappear while we’re in this state, we’re as good as dead, so we’re not waiting around. We’re heading out-system at maximum burn. I suggest you do the same. Over.”

  “Glad you made it, Sallat,” Kearn recorded for return. “We’ve lost translight, too. I’m afraid I don’t believe in coincidence anymore, so my best guess is that Hunter and every other Fleet vessel has suffered the same thing. I’ll send you what data we have on a girl, Lisset Hawthorne, now dead, who claimed to have created the cores. It may not explain much, but I think it’s best she not remain a secret. Maybe someday someone will make sense of her.

  “The local I & G staff are in need of rescue. You should detect a beacon from their station in high orbit of the gas giant. I hope you can spare the time to pick them up. Right now we’re approaching Ona’s fueling platform, which has been commandeered by a rogue SES agent who came aboard my ship at Merada. I’d be grateful if you could take him off my hands as well.”

  After the requisite delay, Sallat’s reply arrived. Whisper would stop to take aboard the stranded I&G crew, but with Hunter at large, he would not risk a rendezvous at the fueling platform to take on Fyat. Well, Kearn thought, it had been worth the asking, but hardly any surprise that Sallat should refuse. A captain would have to be insane to willingly bring aboard a renegade assassin.

  Sallat would also share with Lady all his own information regarding some mysterious occurrences inside the Commonwealth. Maybe they had something to do with Lisset and her war, maybe not. What was most important was to see that the raw, unaltered facts found a home in public datastores. Gods, phantoms, unfathomable conflicts, and rogue assassins were matters for a later date. For now Kearn was just anxious to get Aprile safely back aboard Lady where she belonged. With his vessel intact and all passengers and crew accounted for, Kearn realized, a captain had some small reason to be content in spite of whatever horrors lay outside his hull. One might even start thinking of the future again.

  Accompanying Sallat’s transmission had been a list of eight worlds he knew to have survived Freedom’s Reign: the five he had refused to cleanse himself and three more he’d successfully defended.

  Kearn couldn’t help but notice that Merada was not listed among the eight. It would take a long time for the extent of destruction to become fully known, now that the spread of information was once again limited to the quaint and cumbersome speed of light.

  ***

  After docking Lady at Ona’s fueling platform, Kearn came down from the bridge to welcome Aprile. Only the three who’d left Lady--Aprile and the two ex-assassins--would be returning. The Onari survivors had refused an offer of transport, as they probably would have even had Fyat not killed many of their colleagues. They had on hand a number of intrasystem craft they would now use to seek survivors on Ona before proceeding to the system’s other habitable body, Delchet.

  The returning flyer eased into its cradle in Lady’s hangar, and the chamber repressurized. Minutes later the airlock hissed open to admit the arriving trio to the antechamber where Kearn anxiously waited.

  Fyat emerged first. Kearn barely acknowledged the stone-faced assassin as he passed, for he was already looking beyond him at the only one he really cared to see.

  Aprile’s eyes were dull, her stare vacant. She barely spared her captain a glance. Until now Kearn had been debating whether or not to embrace her, but as she blinked and averted her gaze from his, such thoughts evaporated and he allowed her to pass unmolested.

  Coleridge came out last. She paused at the lock and regarded Kearn with detached concern.

  “She’s never killed before,” Coleridge said academically. “She did a lot of it down there.” No sympathy was evident in her words, but rather something like vindication. Another innocent had been dragged into the same pit in which she herself had been forced to live.

  She moved along, and Kearn was left alone.

  It was hardly the homecoming he’d hoped for, but all things considered it was hardly grounds for complaint. Aprile was alive, which was more than could be said for billions on Ona and elsewhere.

  ***

  EPILOGUE

  The first time Kearn had held his newborn daughter, still slick from the womb, he had wept. Now, as he cradled tiny Coura Martijn in his arms for the second time, he looked down into her wide, innocent eyes and smiled. Those eyes couldn’t even focus properly yet, but the girl knew enough not to be afraid. Little Coura, named for her mother’s mother, looked back lazily with her baby’s mouth hanging open and miniature fists curled at her neck.

  Holding the warm little body to his chest, Kearn whispered in her ear. “Coura,” he said gently, the name already growing familiar on his tongue. “I can tell already you won’t cause me grief like everyone else who comes aboard, will you? No.” He lowered his lips to the tiny thing’s forehead and planted the lightest of kisses on her pink skin.

  After something like an eternity, Kearn looked up and let his world expand to encompass the two others present in Lady’s medlounge. Reclining in her bed, Serenity looked on with a weary smile. Beneath the blanket her abdomen bore the still-fresh scar from the incision via which Coura had come into the universe.

  Standing close at Ren’s bedside was a man who’d come aboard Lady at Ona’s fueling platform, a last-minute arrival shuttled over from Whisper. Simon Ascher was yet another exile from the Interim, one whose crime in fact had been the attempt to liberate Ren from Interim captivity. From the man’s own account of the story, and from the data sent over by Sallat, it seemed certain that Lisset had guided Ascher in this action. The girl-god’s motives, of course, would never be known
. Like everything else about her, these actions only made her more of an enigma. Or maybe just more human.

  Ascher was a good man, if a bit on the timid side. For one who’d lived his life strictly by the rules, he seemed to have adjusted well to a wildly new set of circumstances. Kearn would offer him a permanent place on Lady, not least because he was a competent career spacer, but more importantly because he seemed to have some sort of relationship brewing with Ren. He seemed to make her happy.

  Lady’s first destination after Ona was not one of the eight planets of Sallat’s list, but rather just the nearest non-Commonwealth-affiliated world whose Catalog entry (perhaps the one useful thing the Interim had bequeathed the universe) made it likely to have avoided the attention of Freedom’s Reign. Nevertheless, there was an element of risk in any voyage now. Who knew what worlds had been laid waste? Even those that had emerged unscathed might face major upheaval as a result of the Interim’s removal from its self-appointed role as power broker throughout human space.

  Then again, who could tell yet if the Interim had really ended? At the moment it remained a mere assumption, if a strong one, that the translight failure witnessed at Ona was a universal effect. Even deprived of the basis of its power, the former Commonwealth might still harbor unhealthy designs for the rest of the species. Not likely, if humanity’s pre-Interim history--a time in which interstellar conflict had been utterly unheard of--was any indicator.

  Kearn did not envy Sallat’s place in whatever the new order turned out to be. Even with its founding purpose voided, the former Interim was not likely to look kindly upon the actions of a renegade captain. Whisper might find itself a marked ship.

  And there was still another reason not to envy Sallat and his crew. Like every Fleet ship, Whisper was not equipped with enough, or indeed any, hibe capsules for its crew. Kearn had given Sallat a handful of spares along with what other necessities of life he could spare. Whisper would make it, but the long sublight voyage would not be pleasant.

  The one stroke of luck for Fleet was that their so-called void engines still functioned for propulsion. This second exponent of Prophet operated not on the spurious alien ‘magic’ that powered translight, but on real scientific principles to convert the invisible energy of space itself into thrust. Indeed, as Sallat’s datastores revealed, Fleet had long ago reverse-engineered the alien versions and begun to construct their own copies. Whisper’s complete void engine specs now graced Lady’s datastores, and Ilias was drawing up plans for Lady’s eventual overhaul.